What are the top podcasts in any country right now?

Every chart on this page is read live from Apple's public top-podcasts RSS endpoint at itunes.apple.com/<country>/rss/toppodcasts/limit=<n>/genre=<id>/json. Nothing is hand-curated, hand-ranked, or re-ordered. The response you see is Apple's ranking for that storefront and category at the moment it was fetched, and the fetch timestamp is printed above the list.

Apple recomputes its storefront charts on its own schedule, typically at least once per day. This page caches each country + category + limit combination for one hour, so a refresh within that hour returns the cached copy (the API sends an X-Cache: HIT header) and a refresh after it re-fetches from Apple (X-Cache: MISS). The "fetched" timestamp above the list always tells you which one you are looking at.

Apple's top-level podcast genre IDs are 1301 Arts, 1321 Business, 1303 Comedy, 1304 Education, 1483 Fiction, 1511 Government, 1512 Health & Fitness, 1487 History, 1305 Kids & Family, 1502 Leisure, 1310 Music, 1489 News, 1314 Religion & Spirituality, 1533 Science, 1324 Society & Culture, 1545 Sports, 1318 Technology, 1488 True Crime, and 1309 TV & Film. Genre 26 is the parent "Podcasts" node used for the all-categories chart. You can pass either the numeric ID or the readable slug in the URL — ?genre=1488 and ?genre=true-crime resolve to the same chart.

Not necessarily identical. This tool reads Apple's public top-podcasts RSS feed, which is the ranking Apple publishes for programmatic access. The Top Shows chart rendered inside the Apple Podcasts app and on podcasts.apple.com/charts is generated by Apple separately and can refresh at a different moment, so ordering near the bottom of a long list may differ by a position or two. Treat this page as Apple's published feed, not as a reverse-engineered guess at the in-app chart.

Apple charts are computed per storefront, not globally. A show that sits at #1 in the US chart may not appear at all in the German or Japanese chart, because the ranking reflects activity from accounts registered to that storefront. There is no worldwide Apple podcast chart to select; the country selector is the chart.

Yes. The URL updates as you change the selectors, so /tools/podcast-chart-explorer?country=DE&genre=news loads the German news chart directly, and ?country=BR&genre=true-crime loads the Brazilian true crime chart. You can also append &limit=100 for a longer list. Copy the address bar, or use the Copy link button under the results.

This page requests 50 rows by default. The underlying API accepts any limit from 1 to 100, set with the limit query parameter, so ?limit=100 gives you the longest chart Apple's RSS endpoint will serve and ?limit=10 gives you a quick top ten. Values outside 1–100 are rejected with a 400 invalid_limit error rather than silently clamped.

Smaller storefronts do not always publish a ranked chart for every category. When that happens Apple returns a valid but empty feed, and this page tells you so in plain language instead of showing a fake list or an error. An empty result is a real answer about that market, not a failure of the tool. Try the all-categories chart for the same country to confirm the storefront itself is publishing.

No. Apple does not publish download or listener counts in these feeds, and no rank can be converted into an audience number. Rank is a relative ordering within one storefront and one category. For actual audience figures you need the show's own hosting statistics measured against the IAB Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines v2.2, which only the publisher can see.

Each platform ranks only its own listening activity and publishes its own chart, using undisclosed and different weightings. Apple's chart, Spotify's podcast charts, and YouTube's podcast charts routinely disagree about the top show in the same country on the same day. None of them is a cross-platform ranking, so comparing a show's Apple rank to its Spotify rank tells you about platform mix, not about total audience.

Apple has never published its chart formula, so anything stated with certainty about the weighting is a guess. The observable behaviour is that new-follower velocity moves shows far more than cumulative audience size does. That is why a show can appear in the top ten within days of a launch push and disappear a fortnight later while its download numbers stay flat. A large, stable, loyal audience does not by itself hold a chart position.

The underlying feed is Apple's public RSS output, so read Apple's own terms before republishing it, and attribute Apple as the source. This page does not add a licence of its own to Apple's data. If you need a redistributable, openly licensed podcast dataset instead, Podcast Index publishes an open index and API.

No. There is no sign-up, no key, and no payment. The chart endpoint is unauthenticated and rate limited to 30 requests per window per client, which is well above what interactive use needs. If you do hit the limit the page shows a plain rate-limit message and the next request a moment later succeeds.

Only loosely. Categories differ enormously in how many shows compete in them and how much listening they attract, so the same numeric position represents very different amounts of activity in Comedy, News, and, say, Government. Ranks are meaningful within one storefront and one category over time, which is why comparing the same chart week over week is far more informative than comparing two charts side by side.