How to rank on Pocket Casts charts

To rank on Pocket Casts charts you have to separate two surfaces that look the same in the app. The Trending and Top 100 lists are generated automatically from listening behaviour Pocket Casts does not describe. The Featured section is chosen by people at Pocket Casts, and it is the only one that takes a pitch. Most advice that treats them as one thing sends you chasing a submission form that does not exist.

Pocket Casts is owned by Automattic, which acquired it in July 2021, and its mobile apps have been open source since October 2022. Neither fact changes the ranking, but both explain why the documentation you are about to read is thin: Pocket Casts publishes its app code and not its chart logic.

What Pocket Casts actually publishes

Pocket Casts maintains a public Top Podcasts list at lists.pocketcasts.com, stamped with the date it was generated. In-app, the Discover tab carries dynamically generated sections including Featured and Trending.

What Pocket Casts has never published for the automatic lists:

• The signal being ranked (plays, follows, new followers, completion, or a blend)
• The window the list covers
• Whether the list is per-country
• How a show enters or leaves it

How podcast charts work covers why that is common: most apps treat their ranking as a product decision rather than a spec.

Step 1: get indexed properly

Pocket Casts indexes podcasts from submissions, either through the search bar in the app or the submission form. It accepts an RSS feed URL or an Apple Podcasts link. Pocket Casts says it can take a little while after submission before the show appears in search.

Search for your show in the app once it is in. Check that the artwork loads, the description is not truncated, and recent episodes are present. A feed that half-parses will sit in the index looking broken to every listener who finds it, and no chart fixes that.

Step 2: pitch the Featured section, because it is the one that takes a pitch

This is the highest-leverage step and almost nobody does it. Pocket Casts says on its podcast producers page that the Featured section is picked by people at Pocket Casts, and that "to ensure that all podcasts have an equal opportunity at being featured, selections are made on the basis of merit."

It also states what it is looking for: new and emerging podcasts, or podcasts beginning a new season, while adding that no podcast is out of the question.

The stated bar for consideration is low:

1. One to two episodes in the feed (or one episode and a trailer).
2. A name, description, artwork and a well formed feed before you submit.
3. Send the suggestion to curation@pocketcasts.com.

The timing implication is the useful part. A show starting a new season is explicitly named as a fit, so the pitch is worth sending in the week before a season launch rather than during a mid-season plateau.

Step 3: fix your Apple rating, because Pocket Casts reads it

Pocket Casts says the ratings it displays "are based on user-submitted ratings from within the app as well as ratings that we've collected from a number of different third-party sources, one of which is Apple Podcasts," combined through its own aggregation with weighting on how fresh a rating is.

Two consequences worth acting on:

• Ratings work you do in Apple Podcasts shows up in Pocket Casts. Asking listeners for an Apple rating improves how your show looks on both surfaces. That overlaps directly with the work in how to rank on Apple Podcasts charts.
• Ratings left inside Pocket Casts stay there. Pocket Casts says in-app ratings do not contribute to a podcast's rating on any other platform, and it does not expose rating data to creators through an API. You will not see this number in your own dashboard.

Freshness weighting also means a strong rating from three years ago decays. A season launch is the natural moment to ask again.

Step 4: build the behaviour the automatic lists most plausibly measure

Without a published formula, chase the things every listening-based ranking has in common: people following the show, and people finishing episodes.

Pocket Casts listeners skew toward heavy podcast consumers who use playback speed, silence trimming, and deep queues. That audience notices padding faster than a casual one. Cut the cold open housekeeping, get to the subject, and check where people stop.

There is no Pocket Casts-side retention report to check this in. Use your host's episode-level drop-off data, or the same audience retention view you would use for Spotify chart position, and treat the fix as cross-platform rather than app-specific.

Step 5: know that paid Discover placement exists, and what it is not

Pocket Casts also sells placement. Its producers page states: "We now offer a placement in our Discover section for podcast producers/creators to attract more listeners."

Paid placement buys visibility in Discover. It does not buy a chart position, and Pocket Casts does not present it as a route into the Featured section or the Top 100. Budget for it as a distribution buy that might produce follows, which might eventually show up in the automatic lists, and measure it as an acquisition channel rather than a ranking tactic.

Step 6: measure whether any of it worked, from your side

Pocket Casts sends you nothing. No placement notification, no rank history, no rating export. So the only way to know a feature or a Top 100 run happened is to catch it in your own numbers.

Set this up before you pitch, not after:

1. Record a baseline. Take your average downloads per episode over the four weeks before the pitch, at the same day-count after publication. Comparing a two-day-old episode against a three-week-old one produces a fake result.
2. Watch the app breakdown. If your host or analytics tool splits listening by app, Pocket Casts appears as its own line. A feature shows up there first, usually as a step change in new listeners rather than a lift across your existing audience.
3. Check the shape, not just the total. A Discover or Featured placement tends to bring a burst that decays over a week or two. Follows that persist after the burst are the part worth counting.

If the Pocket Casts line does not move, the placement either did not happen or did not reach your category. Either way you learned it in a week instead of assuming.

How to read a Pocket Casts rank without misleading anyone

A Pocket Casts Top 100 position tells you your show is among the most listened to inside one app, by an undisclosed measure, over an undisclosed window.

The reporting rules are the same ones that apply to Amazon Music charts and every other undocumented chart:

Never quote a rank as a listener count. A number-20 slot in Pocket Casts and a number-20 slot in Apple describe different populations of different sizes.

Never add app-reported plays to your download total. Pocket Casts reports nothing to you directly, and in-app listening counts a different event than a download does. What counts as a podcast download covers the distinction.

The one number that works across all of them

Pocket Casts will not send you rankings, ratings or listener data. Neither will most apps. The only measurement that stays consistent while every platform runs its own private counter is the one taken at your feed.

Podder measures downloads and audience from the prefix up, so a Pocket Casts feature or a Top 100 run shows up as a real change in your baseline instead of a screenshot you cannot verify.