Podscan Alerts

Arvid Kahl's Podscan crawls millions of podcasts and lets you set keyword alerts the way you'd set them for press mentions, except for audio. The transcript search is the actual unlock; you can find every time your brand or competitor was named, with context. Best for brand monitoring teams; less essential if you only care about your own show's analytics.

Podscan is Arvid Kahl's bootstrapped attempt to do for podcasts what Google Alerts does for the web, and after a couple of years of public building, it works. The platform transcribes and indexes a continuously growing catalogue of over four million podcasts, then surfaces mentions of whatever keywords or phrases you've subscribed to. Where it gets interesting is the context layer. Instead of just flagging the word, it pulls a transcript snippet and uses AI to filter for sentiment and theme, which cuts down on the false positives that kill these kinds of tools. Alerts arrive in real time via email or webhook. Pricing has a clear ladder: Premium covers 50 alerts and includes full host contact data, Professional bumps that to 500 alerts and 5 team seats, and Advanced goes unlimited with 10 seats. There's a 10-day free trial and a 50% discount in the first year for bootstrapped or recently founded companies, which is the kind of detail that tells you who built it. The honest limit: this is a monitoring product. If you're a podcaster who just wants to see how your own show is doing, Podscan is the wrong shape. It's for marketing teams tracking branded mentions, PR people watching client coverage, and competitive intel folks who want to know which shows competitors are advertising on. In that lane, there's nothing else like it.