You have a podcast, and you have a problem that has nothing to do with the audio. Someone asks where they can hear it, and you have to decide what to send them. An Apple Podcasts link is useless on most Android phones. A Spotify link annoys the Apple loyalists. Posting five links looks amateur, and nobody clicks five links anyway.
Podfollow solves exactly that problem, and it does it well. But it does not work the way the "top 50 podcast submission sites" lists claim it does, and that misunderstanding costs shows real listeners every month.
We handle the whole thing — the feed work that makes a Podfollow link possible, the ownership claim, the destination configuration, the social card, the vanity URL, the analytics, and the wider directory submissions that Podfollow itself depends on. Then we show you what the link is actually doing.
This matters, so we will say it plainly. You cannot submit a podcast to Podfollow. There is no queue, no review team, no application, no "add your show" button.
Podfollow builds its index from the Apple Podcasts directory. The moment Apple approves and lists your show, a Podfollow link for it already exists — by default it is podfollow.com followed by your Apple Podcasts ID number. You did not create it. It was generated for you.
Which produces two very different situations, and the free audit exists to tell you which one you are in:
Your show is in Apple. Your link is already live and probably already being seen by people who found it through search or through someone else's share. It is showing whatever snapshot of your feed Podfollow took, whenever it took it. If your artwork changed, your title changed, or you migrated hosts, that snapshot may be badly out of date — and you have no control over it until you claim the show.
Your show is not in Apple. Then no amount of Podfollow work will help, because there is nothing for it to find. The job is an Apple Podcasts submission first, and the Podfollow work happens 24 to 48 hours after Apple approves you.
Anyone who offers to "submit your show to Podfollow" as a standalone deliverable is selling you something that does not exist.
Podcast growth work splits into two layers that get confused constantly.
The listing layer is where your show lives: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Podcast Index, JioSaavn, iVoox and the rest. That work is mostly one-time and mechanical. Once you are listed and claimed, you are listed.
The link layer is what you point people at when you promote. Every Instagram bio, every newsletter, every guest appearance, every QR code on a conference banner, every "listen here" in a press release. This layer is not one-time at all. It runs every day, and every badly configured click is a listener you paid to reach and then dropped.
Podfollow is a link-layer tool. It is one of the best of them, it is free, and it is built by people who make podcasts themselves — Folder Media, the UK team behind Fun Kids and the British Podcast Awards. Podfollow reports over a million link clicks a month across the shows using it.
Our service covers both layers, because a perfect link pointing at a broken listing is worthless, and a perfect listing nobody can reach is equally worthless.
By default, Podfollow sends iOS users to Apple Podcasts, Android users to Spotify, and desktop users to whatever website is declared in your RSS feed. Claimed shows can change all three, sending listeners instead to iHeartRadio, Pocket Casts, Podchaser, the Podfollow player page, or straight to the raw feed.
Most shows never touch these settings. That is a mistake, and here is how we reason about it per client.
iOS. Apple Podcasts is preinstalled on effectively every iPhone, so the default is almost always correct. We leave it alone unless a client has a genuine strategic reason to push Spotify follows.
Android. This is the lever, and it matters enormously by market. In India, and in Android-dominant audiences generally, the Android destination is where the majority of your clicks land. Spotify is the sensible default because it plays immediately for anyone who has the app. For shows with a strong regional-language or India-first audience, we sometimes route to the Podfollow player page instead, so the listener can play without any app install at all.
Desktop. The default is your website, and this is where we most often override. The theory is sound — desktop users have time, so send them traffic. In practice a lot of shows have the wrong website in their feed: a production company homepage, an agency site, or a page where finding the actual episodes takes three clicks. If your site does not put a play button in front of a first-time visitor within one screen, we point desktop at the Podfollow player page instead and stop losing those people.
There is also a behaviour worth knowing about episode links. If you publish an episode and share its link before Apple has ingested it, Podfollow will not send people to a broken Apple page — it falls back to your Podfollow profile page so they can still listen, then switches back once Apple catches up. That is a sensible design, but it changes how you should time launch-day promotion, and we plan around it.
Claiming is free and it unlocks everything — vanity URL, destination control, stats, custom social images, user access. It is also where self-serve attempts die.
Route one, the claim email. Podfollow sends a claim email to the address published inside your RSS feed. Simple, unless you do not control that mailbox, or your host hides the owner email by default, or the address belongs to a producer who left two years ago.
Route two, the verification code. Podfollow lets you paste a code into your show description or an episode description instead. It reads the feed, finds the code, and confirms you control the publishing. This route works when the email route does not, and it is the one we use most often for clients whose feeds were set up by someone else.
Route three, manual verification. You email Podfollow your link from an address on the podcast's own domain, and they send a claim email manually. Slower, human, and effective when the first two are closed.
We also set up user access properly at this stage. Podfollow supports owner, admin, editor and marketer roles — marketers see stats only, editors can update metadata, admins can add editors, owners can transfer ownership. For agencies, networks and in-house marketing teams this is the difference between a manageable account and one person's personal login holding the keys.
Two technical failures account for most of the "my Podfollow link looks wrong" complaints we see.
The snapshot problem. Podfollow takes a snapshot of your feed to build its directory record. It does not necessarily refresh on its own. So a show that rebranded, redesigned its artwork, or rewrote its description can be sitting behind a link that still shows the old version — including on every social card that link generates. Claimed shows can force a refresh with the Re-check RSS control, or override the title and image directly in the dashboard. Unclaimed shows can do neither.
The crawler block. If your site or feed sits behind Cloudflare or a similar WAF, its bot rules can quietly block Podfollow's servers from reading the feed. Nothing errors visibly — your record just stops updating. Podfollow documents the fix: a firewall rule matching User Agent contains "podfollow", set to Allow. We deploy that rule, and we check the same class of block against every other crawler that needs your feed, because if Podfollow is being refused, so is somebody else.
Podfollow automatically generates an Open Graph social card from your square artwork whenever your link is shared. Claimed shows can change the colour treatment or upload a bespoke image entirely. We treat this as design work, not an afterthought — that card is the thumbnail every share, every DM preview and every WhatsApp forward will show.
When artwork changes, social platforms cache the old card for a day or more. We flush it deliberately using Facebook's Sharing Debugger and X's Card Validator, so a launch does not go out carrying last season's image.
The vanity URL turns podfollow.com/1234567890 into podfollow.com/yourshowname. That is a real brand asset: it is sayable on air, printable on a flyer, and it survives being read aloud. It also surfaces when someone searches your show within Podfollow itself.
Episode links get the same treatment. Each one pulls that episode's own artwork for its social card and drops listeners at that specific episode — which is what you want for guest promotion, clip campaigns and press outreach, where the pitch is one episode, not the whole show.
Claimed shows get click-through statistics broken down by iOS, Android and desktop, and the data is exportable. Combined with disciplined UTM tagging — a different tagged link for every channel, every guest, every campaign — this becomes the only reliable first-party read on which promotion actually produces listeners. Download numbers from your host cannot tell you that. They tell you what happened, never why.
Podfollow also runs a free chart-tracking tool covering Apple Podcasts and Spotify positions, which it launched the day Spotify shut Chartable down. We set it up for every client and include it in reporting.
But we will be straight with you about what charts are. Apple has confirmed on the record that its charts are calculated from a mix of new subscriptions, playback activity and completion rate — and that ratings and reviews are not factored in. So the "please rate and review us" ask at the end of every episode is not moving your chart position. New follows and finished episodes are. That changes what your call to action should say, and we rewrite it accordingly. No agency, including this one, can guarantee a chart position, and anybody who does is guessing with your money.
Because Podfollow reads from Apple, and because your link is only as good as the destinations behind it, the work extends outward:
Directory submission and claims. Spotify, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Podcast Addict, Player FM, Podcast Index, TuneIn, Deezer, iVoox, and the India stack including JioSaavn and Hubhopper. Several of these need a manual claim that one-click distribution never completes.
Search and AI discovery. Full episode transcripts published on canonical episode pages, PodcastSeries and PodcastEpisode schema, rel="alternate" feed auto-discovery, and internal linking. This is what puts your show in Google results and in AI answer engines when somebody asks a question your episode answers — a channel that did not meaningfully exist three years ago and now sends real traffic.
We deliver globally, with dedicated attention to six markets. United States and Canada — iOS-heavy, so the Apple default holds and the desktop and social card work carries the weight. United Kingdom — a mature, competitive market where vanity URLs and press-ready episode links matter for coverage. Australia — similar profile, with timing built around local release schedules. Singapore — multilingual audiences, so language declaration and destination testing across app preferences. India — Android-majority, which makes the Android destination setting the single most consequential choice on the account, plus regional-language metadata and diaspora targeting across the US, UK, Canada, Australia and the Gulf.
We have run podcast submission, feed remediation and directory claim work across dozens of platforms — Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Deezer, iVoox, JioSaavn, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Podcast Index and more. That experience is why this page tells you Podfollow has no submission form instead of selling you one.
Our people are practising SEO and audio marketing specialists, not a content desk repackaging platform documentation. Every claim on this page was verified against Podfollow's own current documentation before publication, and we revise these pages when platforms change, because in this industry they change constantly.
And here is our standing position, which you will find on every platform page we publish: Podfollow is free. The link is free, the claim is free, the stats are free, the charts tool is free. You are not paying us for access. You are paying for the feed engineering, the claim recovery when the owner email is unreachable, the routing decisions based on your actual audience, the asset design, the wider directory work, and the reporting that tells you whether any of it moved. If you have the time and the technical confidence to do it yourself, do it yourself — we will tell you so during the audit.
We would rather say no than take a fee that will not return anything.
If your show is not yet in Apple Podcasts, this is an Apple submission job first — we will scope it that way. If your feed is private, paywalled or blocked, Podfollow has nothing to index. If you have one unfinished episode, get to three or four first. If you want a guaranteed chart position, no honest vendor can sell you one. And if you need production work — recording, editing, sound design — we will refer you to someone who does that properly.
Starter — feed audit and remediation, Apple verification, Podfollow claim, destination configuration, vanity URL, social card setup, and a documented handover.
Growth — everything in Starter plus wider directory submission and claims, episode-link workflow, UTM tracking architecture, chart monitoring, transcript and schema implementation on your episode pages, and monthly reporting.
Enterprise — for networks, publishers and multi-show brands: bulk feed remediation, role-based user access across teams, standardised link and card templates across the catalogue, migration handling with GUID preservation and redirects, and consolidated cross-show reporting.
We do not publish prices, because we do not know what your feed looks like yet. Every quote follows the free audit.
Send us your RSS feed URL and your show name. Within two business days you will get a written audit: whether Apple has you, whether a Podfollow record already exists and how stale it is, whether anything is blocking crawler access, what your destinations should be for your actual audience, and what we would fix first.
No obligation, and no charge. If the honest answer is that you can handle this yourself in an afternoon, the audit will say so.
Not in the way that phrase suggests, and we would rather explain than pretend. Podfollow has no submission form. It builds its directory from Apple Podcasts, so once Apple lists your show, a Podfollow link already exists automatically. What we actually do is make sure Apple has you, verify the link resolves correctly, claim the show in your name, and configure everything you can only control once it is claimed.
Almost always because the show is not in the Apple Podcasts directory yet, or was approved very recently — Apple's search can take around 24 hours to reflect a new listing. If you were approved longer ago than that, the usual causes are a firewall blocking feed access or a feed error, both of which the audit checks.
Nothing. The link, the claim, the vanity URL, the analytics, the landing page and the chart tracking are all free. Our fee covers the work around it, not access to it.
Podfollow and pod.link are podcast-specific smart links that detect the visitor's device and send them straight into a listening app. Linktree is a general link-in-bio page that lists options and requires the visitor to choose. For podcast promotion, device detection converts better, because fewer decisions means fewer drop-offs.
Podfollow holds a snapshot of your feed that does not always refresh by itself, and social platforms separately cache the sharing card. A claimed show can force a feed re-check and upload artwork directly, and we flush the social cache using the platforms' own debugging tools so the correct image appears immediately.
We cannot promise that, and nobody credible can. Apple has stated its charts run on new subscriptions, playback activity and completion rate, and that ratings and reviews are not counted. Better link routing genuinely improves how many clicks turn into follows, which is one real input — but it is one input, and the show itself is the rest.
Yes. Most of our podcast clients are in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Singapore, alongside our India work. Everything is delivered in English, remotely, with reporting on your timezone.
Around one to two weeks for a show already listed on Apple. If we have to submit to Apple first, add Apple's review time, which typically runs a few days to about a week.
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