How to check any podcast sponsorship claim in five minutes

Every list of podcast sponsors — this one included — is a claim about what somebody read. The good part is that podcast sponsorship is one of the few kinds of business data you can verify yourself, for free, from your desk. The evidence is published by the podcaster, in public, and it stays there.

First, three questions that decide whether a number means anything

Before the five minutes, it is worth knowing what to ask of any sponsorship figure you meet, from any source.

1. What is the unit? Shows, publishers, or mentions. One operator running six feeds is one buyer, not six. And a sponsor block pasted into the footer of every episode produces thousands of mentions from a single relationship. The three answers can differ by a factor of a thousand for the same underlying fact.
2. What is the window? “Has advertised” and “is advertising” are different claims. A sponsor that stopped three years ago is still true and no longer useful.
3. Where is the evidence? Any real sponsorship claim can be traced to a specific episode on a specific date. If the claim cannot be reduced to a link you can open, the next five minutes will not help — but that answer is itself informative.

The five-minute procedure

1. Name the show and the window. Write down the exact show and the date range. Thirty seconds.
2. Open the feed, not the app. Most shows link their RSS feed in the site footer; failing that, a podcast index will have it. Open it in a browser. Apps trim descriptions — the feed carries what the publisher actually wrote.
3. Read the episode description. Pick an episode inside the window. The sponsor line is usually there verbatim, often with a promo code or a vanity link.
4. Look for the three signatures. An explicit phrase (sponsored by, brought to you by, presented by, our thanks to); a URL or code built for that show specifically; and the same pairing on several separate publish dates. One of the three can be a coincidence. All three together are a campaign.
5. Test the boundary. Open an episode from outside the window. The line should not be there. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that does the most work.

Try it on us first

The widest-reaching promo code on our boards right now belongs to squarespace.com: 68 distinct codes across 45 shows. Four of them, exactly as the publishers wrote them:

ATP · MPU · GRUBER · CONNECTED

Each of those is a per-show code. Search one together with the brand name, find the show it belongs to, open that show’s feed, and you will find the line that produced it — and the dates it ran on. That is the whole method, applied to us.

We think that is the right order. A source that tells you how to check it is making a different kind of claim than one that asks you to take the total on faith.

What this method cannot tell you

• Absence is not proof. Not finding a sponsor line means it is not in the notes — not that the deal did not happen. Reads that only ever aired out loud leave no written trace.
• Notes get edited. Publishers rewrite descriptions and swap links years later. What you read today is the current version, not necessarily the one that shipped.
• None of it is money. A campaign’s length and breadth are visible. What was paid is not, by anyone, from this evidence.

Those three limits are worth stating plainly, because the method is still the best one available: it costs nothing, it needs no relationship with anyone, and the evidence does not depend on being told the truth by a party with an interest in the answer.

Why we wrote this down

Every name on our boards can be run through the five steps above. If one fails that test, we want to know — that is a defect on our side, and we fix it. The same checks work on any sponsor database; we ran them on the main ones.

Read through 2026-11-07. About the data →
See who is buying in your trade →