Listen Notes

Listen Notes operates a podcast search engine and database that indexes millions of podcasts and episodes aggregated from across the internet. The platform is described as being similar to Google, but for podcasts, allowing users to search the content of podcast episodes rather than just metadata. It serves listeners researching topics or people, journalists conducting research, students learning from audio content, and podcasters seeking cross-promotion opportunities.

The company offers a consumer-facing website alongside a developer-focused product called Listen API (also referred to as PodcastAPI.com), which provides structured, real-time podcast metadata for building applications such as podcast players, music apps, audiobook apps, smart speaker apps, and content curation tools. It states that this API is used by thousands of companies and developers. The company maintains data quality through continuous automated scripts and human moderation intended to filter out deleted feeds, low-quality content, and AI-generated audio.

Listen Notes also provides a Listen Later feature that lets users curate personal playlists of individual podcast episodes without subscribing to full podcast feeds, with playlists deliverable to podcast player apps via RSS. Additional discovery tools include real-time episode tracking, podcast similarity exploration, and curated and community-generated playlists. The company was founded as a side project by Wenbin Fang in 2017 and incorporated as Listen Notes, Inc., a Delaware C-Corp, operating as a small team based in San Francisco.