# What are the top podcasts on Spotify? (https://www.socialcrawl.dev/data/top-podcasts)

As of 2026-08-13, the most-rated podcast on Spotify is The Joe Rogan Experience, rated by 952K listeners at an average of 4.7 out of 5, the leader across 24 of the platform's biggest shows ranked live via the SocialCrawl API. Spotify publishes no listen, download or follower count for a podcast, so how many listeners rated a show is the popularity signal it does report.

Computed 2026-08-13 from a sample of 24.

## Methodology

SocialCrawl reads each show's public listener ratings via the API endpoint /v1/spotify/podcast, one call per podcast by its Spotify show ID, then ranks them by how many listeners have rated the show. 24 podcasts were ranked on 2026-08-13. Spotify publishes no play count, download count, subscriber count or follower count for a podcast anywhere on this surface, so no audience size is reported here and none is estimated. Rating volume is a popularity proxy, not a listener count: it accumulates over a show's entire run, so a long-running podcast outranks a newer one of the same size, and only the small share of listeners who choose to leave a rating is counted at all. The average star rating is reported separately because it answers a different question, and the two leaders usually differ. This is a leaderboard among well-known shows, not an exhaustive scan of every podcast on Spotify. Ratings are read live, never estimated.

## FAQ

### What are the top podcasts on Spotify right now?

As of 2026-08-13, The Joe Rogan Experience is the most-rated show on Spotify, with 952K listener ratings, ahead of every other show in the 24-podcast basket SocialCrawl ranks. The full ranking is in the table above, read live from each show's public Spotify page rather than from a stale estimate.

### Does Spotify publish how many people listen to a podcast?

No. Spotify publishes no play count, download count, subscriber count or follower count for a podcast, including in the data this page reads. That is why this ranking uses how many listeners rated each show, which is a popularity proxy rather than an audience size. No listener number is estimated here. Per-track playcounts are published for music, so the most-streamed song can be answered exactly: see /data/most-streamed-song-on-spotify.

### Which podcast has the highest rating on Spotify?

As of 2026-08-13 the best-rated show in this basket is Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, averaging 5 out of 5 across 28K ratings. That is a different question from the most-rated show, The Joe Rogan Experience, which leads on 952K ratings at an average of 4.7. Rating volume measures how many people heard a show; the average measures how much they liked it.

### Why does rating count favour older podcasts?

Ratings accumulate over a show's entire run and are never reset, so a podcast that has published for a decade collects them far longer than an equally popular show launched last year. The count is cumulative, not a measure of who is listening this month, and only the small share of listeners who choose to rate a show appear in it at all. Read it as a long-run popularity signal, not a current-audience chart.

### Does this ranking cover every podcast on Spotify?

No, it ranks a curated basket of 24 of the biggest and best-known shows on Spotify, not an exhaustive scan of the catalogue. A show outside the basket with more ratings would not appear, so treat it as a leaderboard among well-known podcasts rather than a full platform census.

## Explore with AI

Questions this API answers, phrased for an AI assistant:

- What are the top podcasts on Spotify?
- Which podcast has the most ratings on Spotify?
- What is the highest rated podcast on Spotify?

Data source: SocialCrawl unified social data API. https://www.socialcrawl.dev/data