Listen Notes: the best podcast search engine

Listen Score: How Popular a Podcast is?

Listen Score (LS) is a metric that shows the estimated popularity of a podcast compared to all other rss-based public podcasts in the world on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher, the more popular. It's like Nielsen ratings for podcasts.
You can see the Listen Score on a podcast page (Example: The Daily), a search result page (Example: Search Podcasts), and a Listen Later playlist page (Example: Podcast Playlist). We only display Listen Scores for the top 10% podcasts (ranked by Listen Score) for now.
Listen Score is also included in our commercial products: Podcast API and Datasets (i.e., batch export podcast metadata to CSV files).
Questions? hello@listennotes.com
Listen Score

Listen Score FAQ

1. How do you calculate a Listen Score? 🔗

We developed a mathematical model to calculate a Listen Score for each podcast, based on the 1st party data (e.g., activities on our website) and 3rd party data (e.g., media mentions, reviews...).
We were inspired by standardized metrics such as Nielsen ratings, credit score, domain authority...

2. What is a good Listen Score? 🔗

Generally speaking, the higher the Listen Score of a podcast, the better.
But it's important not to judge Listen Scores in absolute terms. That's because Listen Score is a relative metric by definition. It's not possible to say that a Listen Score of 30 is good, or 50, or 60, or 70. It's all relative.
Here's a general rule of thumb: A Listen Score is good if it's higher than or comparable to similar podcasts.

3. How to improve your Listen Score? 🔗

Listen Score represents the estimated popularity of a podcast. Therefore, the only way to improve the Listen Score of your podcast is to make your podcast more popular, i.e., getting more listeners.

4. How to use Listen Score? 🔗

Here are a few good use cases:
  • Advertising/PR/marketing professionals want to know if a particular podcast is worth pitching. How to become a Podcast Guest?
  • Listeners want to know if a podcast is worth the time to listen to.
  • A celebrity/influencer/CEO who receives an interview request from a podcast wants to know how popular it is.
  • Podcast apps/websites want to recommend podcasts based on the perceived quality/popularity.
In fact, Listen Score has already been one of many ranking signals of our podcast search engine.

5. How often do you update Listen Scores? 🔗

Every ~30 days. Last updated: Jan. 28, 2025

6. Why some podcasts don't have Listen Scores? 🔗

There are two possible reasons why the Listen Score is not displayed on a specific podcast page:
1. We may not have enough data for the podcast, so we can't calculate the Listen Score yet.
2. The podcast is not in the top 10% podcasts. We only display the Listen Score for the top 10% podcasts for now.

7. Why the Listen Score of my podcast hasn't changed for a few months? 🔗

Listen Score is like your credit score. It may or may not change for a period of time.
Please note that it's possible that a podcast's Listen Score drops. By definition, Listen Score is a relative metric. Over time, Some podcasts become relatively more popular, while others become relatively less popular.

8. I want to display Listen Score on my website. Do you provide a widget for me to embed to my website? 🔗

Yes. You can find the embed code under the EMBED tab on your podcast page. Here's an example.

9. What is Global Rank? 🔗

Global Rank is the ranking of 3,491,654 podcasts based on Listen Score.
For example: Let's assume there are only 5 podcasts in the world: A, B, C, D, and E. The podcast A's Listen Score (LS) is 25, B's is 30, C's is 50, D's is 70, and E's is 95. As we can see, E has the highest Listen Score (i.e., LS 95), meaning E is the most popular podcast. E's Global Rank is Top 20%. D (LS 70) is the second most popular podcast, and its Global Rank is Top 40%. C (LS 50) is the third most popular podcast, and its Global Rank is Top 60%... You get the idea.
Global Rank is for podcasts of all regions, languages, and genres. In the future, we may consider ranking podcasts in specific regions, languages, and genres, e.g., Top 1% podcasts in Japan.

10. Are there any podcast top charts by Listen Score? 🔗

Yes. Please check out the "Best Podcasts" pages.
PODCAST SEARCH ENGINE
You can use our website to search 3,491,654 podcasts and 170,419,388 episodes by people, places, or topics.
If I have seen further than others, it is by listening to podcasts and standing upon the shoulders of giants.  ‐ Isaac "Llamacorn" Newton
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