Podcasts Looking for Guests

What “looking for guests” can honestly mean

A podcast is open to a guest pitch in one of three ways, and they are worth separating because only one of them is common:

• It publishes a guest submission form on its own website. Unambiguous, and rare: exactly 5 of the 408 shows in our directory do it. If a show has one, use it and skip everything below, because it is the process the host chose.
• It publishes evidence that it books outside guests, usually a guest's name in a recent episode title or a description of itself as an interview show. Checkable, and common enough to be useful.
• It takes guests but publishes nothing about it. Extremely common, and invisible from the outside. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence here, which is why the list below is not a list of shows that refuse guests.

The second category is the one this page lists, and the numbers put it in perspective. Of the 383 feeds we read, 128 (33%) published visible evidence of booking guests. The other 67% published nothing a guest can check, which is a statement about what is knowable, not a verdict on those shows. Separately, 26% had not released an episode in roughly six months, and a dormant feed is not a route in whatever its back catalogue looks like.

The 94 shows, grouped by topic

Every show below cleared three filters: it publishes checkable evidence of booking outside guests, it is still releasing episodes, and it has a page here where you can read the evidence for yourself before you pitch. Within each topic they are ordered by our openness score, most open first. The list is regenerated from the feeds, so it changes when they do.

This is not the whole directory. It is the 94 shows that are simultaneously still publishing, evidenced, and documented here. There are 408 shows in total, and the ones with no published guest signal are not ruled out, only unproven. To search all of them by topic, use the finder below.

Which of these you can actually reach

A show that books guests and cannot be reached is not a target. So here is the second half of the list, measured on the same feeds on November 2, 2026: 84 of the 94 shows above publish a route you can use, and 76 of them publish a contact address in their own feed.

• 1 of 94 (1%): publishes a guest form.
• 76 of 94 (81%): publishes an address in its feed.
• 7 of 94 (7%): contact page on its own site.
• 2 of 94 (2%): own site only, no contact page.
• 8 of 94 (9%): no route we could find.

That is a better rate than the directory at large, and the gap is the interesting part. Across all 383 feeds we read, 75% publish an address and 17% publish no usable route at all. In this list it is 11%. Read it as selection rather than cause: a feed somebody is still maintaining tends to carry an owner tag somebody maintained too, and both of those are what put the show on this list in the first place.

One word this page will not use about any of it is "verified". What we checked is that the show published the address itself, in the feed field Apple requires it to fill in. Nobody can check that a published inbox is still read, and a page that implies otherwise is selling you the same certainty the listicles do. The 10 shows above with no usable route are still on the list, because the guest evidence is real, and the outro of an episode is a place plenty of hosts read out an address they never put on a page.

We do not print the addresses. They belong to named people who published them in a feed for one purpose, and a crawled page listing 76 of them is exactly how a mailing list gets harvested. Each show's page here says which route it publishes and hands the address itself to a signed-in account, one show at a time, at the point you are actually writing to that host.

Pitch the big independent shows, not the small ones

The standard advice is to start small because large shows will not take a cold pitch. Scored against what shows actually publish, that advice was backwards, and this is the most useful finding in the whole study:

• Established shows, roughly 500+ episodes, scored 59/100 on openness to an outside guest. Smaller shows scored 45/100.
• The barrier that mattered was not audience size but a booking desk. Network-run shows scored 40/100 against 51/100 for independent ones, and 19% of the corpus is network-run.
• The most open cohort in the corpus was the big independent show: 77 of them, averaging 65/100.

That is why each entry above says whether the show is independent or network-run. A long-running independent show with visible guest episodes is the best-value pitch in this category, and it is the one most guests talk themselves out of sending.

How to check a show before you spend a pitch on it

Whether a show came off this list or out of your own head, the same four checks take about ninety seconds and will save you most of your wasted pitches:

• Is it still publishing? Look at the date on the most recent episode, not the artwork. Roughly a quarter of the feeds we read had gone quiet for six months.
• Does it have guests at all? Scan five recent episode titles. If none of them names a person other than the host, it may still be a solo show.
• Is there a booking desk? A network or media brand in the author field usually means a producer decides, not the host, and cold pitches route differently.
• Is there a published route in? A guest form on the show's own site beats every other contact method, because it is the one the show asked for.

The last one is worth insisting on. A show that publishes a submission form has told you exactly how it wants to be approached, and using it puts your pitch in the pile the host actually reads.

What to send once you have a shortlist

A target list is not the hard part, and a bad pitch to a good show is a wasted good show. The pattern that works is short and specific: name the episode you actually listened to and why it landed, say in one line who you are and what you can talk about that this audience wants, offer two or three angles rather than a topic, and make it easy to say yes with dates and a link to your one-sheet.

What does not work is the mail-merge that opens with praise for the show in general, describes you at length, and asks the host to figure out what you would talk about. Hosts read a hundred of those.

We publish free tools for each step of that, none of which need an account: a pitch generator that drafts an opener for a specific show, a grader that scores a pitch you have already written, and a one-sheet builder that assembles the page hosts ask for.

How this list was built, and what it cannot tell you

Every show here comes from our own directory of 408 podcasts sourced from public Apple Podcasts data. We fetched each show's public RSS feed, read the feed's own description, publishing cadence and recent episode titles, and scored openness to an outside guest from those signals alone. 383 feeds were readable; 25 were not, and an unreadable feed is counted as unknown rather than as a negative.

• It cannot tell you a show is accepting guests right now. It tells you the show has booked them and is still publishing.
• It cannot see a show that books guests quietly. Plenty do, and they are not on this list because nothing in their feed says so.
• It is a snapshot, not a feed monitor. The feeds behind it were last read on November 2, 2026, and each entry links to a page that shows the episodes the signal came from.
• It is not a ranking of quality. Openness to a cold pitch is not the same as a show being worth pitching, and only you can judge fit.

The full method, the caveats and the raw data are published openly under CC BY 4.0, including the per-show scores. If you disagree with the scoring, you can re-run it.

Frequently asked questions