The Podroll Atlas: A Map of Podcasts Recommending Podcasts
Find out how you can get involved in the Podroll Atlas + get your show recommended by others
When people ask me what I do for a living, I usually say something along the lines of “I recommend podcasts.” Sure, definitely more complicated than that: I’ve been writing a podcast recommendation newsletter for 9+ years, work with clients on their podcast and content strategy, and set up marketing and audience development campaigns. BUT AT THE CORE, I just really love recommending podcasts.
That’s why I was so excited to learn about the Podroll Atlas. A few weeks ago, Alberto Betella posted a beautiful constellation-like image on LinkedIn and I emailed him, “I MUST KNOW MORE.” So, this article is that more. But before we get to that…
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[Newscaster voice] Let’s go to Alberto Betella to tell us about Podroll Atlas
What is the Podroll Atlas?
In a world where algorithms now answer almost every “what should I listen to next?”, a recommendation made by an actual person is starting to feel rare. Algorithmic recommendations are useful, and they are not going away. But they are not the same as a recommendation that a real human being personally stands behind.
Across the open podcast ecosystem, podcasters quietly do exactly that. Inside their own RSS feeds, they publish a list of the other shows they recommend. Hand-picked. Endorsed. No platform involved. The result is a network of nearly 30,000 podcasts and over 42,000 recommendation links. Until now, almost nobody had ever seen it.
Welcome to the Podroll Atlas.
The Podroll Atlas home page showing 28,729 podcasts and 42,595 recommendation links. Every line placed by a real podcaster. Hover any dot to see who recommends it and who it recommends back. Click to zoom in. Search to fly to any title.
A network of human-curated recommendations
Every dot in the Podroll Atlas is a podcast. The bigger the dot, the more often other podcasters recommend that show. The color tells you which company hosts it. Type a few letters into the search box and watch the matching shows light up across a galaxy of 28,729 nodes and 42,595 connections.
Search for any title fragment and watch every matching podcast light up in real time. Here we typed “pod” and the matches scatter across the network of 28,729 podcasts.
Click on any podcast and the Podroll Atlas zooms in. Cyan arrows show every show it recommends, pink arrows show every show that recommends it. The right-hand panel lists each one. From a single click you can hop into the next podcast in the chain, and the next, and the next. You are traveling through a graph that no algorithm built, no platform owns, and no advertiser shaped.
Hover over any podcast and you immediately see how it connects to others. Here, Crime Junkie, recommended by 71 other podcasts.
Podroll: the quiet superpower behind this
Every connection you see in the Podroll Atlas exists because a real podcaster decided to publish a list of shows they personally vouch for, right inside their own RSS feed. They did that using a Podcasting 2.0 tag called <podcast:podroll>.
If you’ve never heard of Podcasting 2.0, here’s the short version. It’s a community-driven effort to add modern features to podcast RSS feeds, run by Adam Curry (also known as “the Podfather”) and Dave Jones at the Podcast Index, built around an open namespace anyone can implement. A few of the tags it adds:
<podcast:transcript>: link to a full transcript for accessibility, SEO, and searchability (also recognized officially by Apple)
<podcast:podroll>: recommend other shows from inside your feed (this is what the Podroll Atlas is built on)
<podcast:chapters>: chapter markers
<podcast:value>: let listeners stream bitcoin sats to you in real time while they listen (the value4value model)
<podcast:funding>: link to PayPal, donations, etc.
<podcast:location>: tag the show or an episode with a place. Great for travel shows, local news, anything geo-relevant.
The best place to dive deeper is the Podcasting 2.0 podcast itself, Adam and Dave’s weekly “board meeting” of the namespace.
Out of all the Podcasting 2.0 tags, <podcast:podroll> is one of the most underappreciated. It is a quiet superpower for podcast discovery, and most podcasters do not yet realize it exists.
Why this is different from “you might also like”
Think about how recommendations normally work on a closed platform. The “you might also like” row is shaped by engagement signals, advertiser interests, A/B tests, the platform’s commercial priorities, and a model nobody outside the company can inspect. It can change overnight. It can be tuned to keep you on that platform.
The podroll is the opposite. It lives in the podcaster’s own RSS feed, where it cannot be silently rewritten by a third party. It travels with the show across every podcast app that reads RSS. It is human-authored, durable, portable, and inspectable. When you focus on a show in the Podroll Atlas and follow the cyan arrows out, you are reading recommendations the creator stood behind and put their name to.
Podroll Atlas focused on Podnews Weekly Review. Cyan arrows out are the shows Sam Sethi and James Cridland recommend; pink arrows in are the shows that recommend Podnews Weekly Review. The right-hand panel lists each one. Click any to hop into that show’s neighborhood.
How the data flows
Everything you see in the Podroll Atlas comes from the Podcast Index’s public datasets. The Index aggregates every <podcast:podroll> tag across the open ecosystem into a single file, refreshed regularly.
When you open the Podroll Atlas, your browser fetches that file once and caches it locally for 24 hours. Every rendering, every search, every layout calculation runs on your own computer. There is no server in the loop, no telemetry, no tracking. Open the Podroll Atlas once and you can use it offline. Reload after 24 hours and you get an automatic refresh from the source. So the recommendations you see are always up to date.
For podcasters: get into the graph
If you want to be part of the podcast recommendation graph, two things have to happen.
First, you recommend other shows. Pick the podcasts you genuinely love and would want your listeners to know about, and add them to your podroll. The act takes a minute and lives forever inside your feed.
Second, other podcasters recommend you. This is the network-effect side. The more your show is genuinely worth recommending, and the more it shows up in podrolls across the ecosystem, the more central it becomes in the graph. Bigger dot. More inbound pink arrows. More chances a curious listener jumps over from a neighbor.
Beyond that, here are concrete ways to use the Atlas as a creator:
Find adjacent shows in your niche and use them as warm intros for cross-promotion swaps. The Atlas makes “who is one degree away from me” visible at a glance.
Sanity-check who to add to your own podroll. See who is already recommending shows similar to yours, and return the favor where it makes sense.
Discover hidden gems your audience would love by exploring outward from a podcast you already love. Pure human curation, no algorithm.
Benchmark your own discoverability. Find your show, see how many others currently recommend you, and watch that grow as you build relationships.
There is one catch. Both sides require a podcast host that supports the <podcast:podroll> tag. Many hosts do not yet. You can see the current list of podroll-supporting hosts here: podcastindex.org/apps (filter: hosting + podroll).
If your current host does not support podroll yet, ask them when they will. Some hosts move faster when their podcasters ask.
For listeners: explore human picks
The Podroll Atlas is a fun starting point. The next step is to listen on an app that surfaces podroll recommendations as you browse, so the recommendations of every host show up right next to their episodes. Several Podcasting 2.0 apps already do this. You can find them on the Podcast Index apps directory filtered for podroll support.
Once you start listening through one of those, “what should I listen to next?” stops being a question for an algorithm and becomes a question for the creator you just spent an hour with.
An open invitation to hosts and apps
The cross-recommendation graph is one of the most beautiful structures in modern media, and almost nobody had ever seen it. The Atlas exists to put it on a screen, a small but tangible reminder of what the open ecosystem already does, today, with no platform’s permission.
But it only exists because some podcast hosting companies decided to write the <podcast:podroll> tag in their RSS feeds, and some podcast apps decided to read it. The same logic applies to every other Podcasting 2.0 tag, from transcripts to chapters to value4value to location. Every host that implements one more tag adds new data to the open feed. Every app that surfaces it turns that data into something a listener can actually see and use.
Each new implementer makes the entire ecosystem more valuable for everyone else. If you run a podcast hosting company or a podcast app and the Podcasting 2.0 namespace is still on your roadmap, please move it up.
If the Podroll Atlas sends ten more podcasters to set up their podroll, ten more listeners to a P2.0 app that displays them, and a few more hosts and apps to implement the namespace, it has done its job.
About the project
The Podroll Atlas was built by Alberto Betella, co-founder of RSS.com. It is a static single-page web app with no server, no backend, and no tracking, released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Anyone can use, adapt, remix and redistribute it, including commercially, as long as they give appropriate credit and link back to the source. The source code is published openly on GitHub.
The data comes from the Podcast Index and from every podcaster who took the time to put a <podcast:podroll> tag in their feed.
Explore the Atlas: atlas.rss.io
I’m back — Arielle here👋
Notes on Podroll Atlas & Alberto’s Work
Learn more about Alberto and RSS.com via this chat we had a few months ago — back when RSS.com introduced a free hosting tier.
Podroll Atlas is different from Podroll, which is a tool that grows your podcast audience with dynamic feed drops.
P.s. a tool that I think might work (potentially better) for you if you’re poking around in this arena is Introcast
Learn more about Podcasting 2.0 here. It’s absolutely worth keeping on top on what they’re building for podcasters — AND taking advantage of all of the tags at your disposal.
That’s it! Thank you to Alberto for guest-writing this article and for sharing your knowledge with us.
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ITS SO BEAU LOOKING!! Thank you for making this Alberto!