For ad sellers, buyers, agencies and brands
Podcast sponsor data your AI assistant can actually look up
Ask “who sponsors the Glenn Beck Program?” and get an answer from detected ad reads, with a date and a link — not a guess from training data. Works in ChatGPT, Claude and Cursor, free to connect.
25 calls a day free · No card · Connecting does not start a trial
The research step, removed
Every job below starts the same way: open a tool, search a brand or a show, read a table, copy what matters into a doc. The reading is quick. The context-switching is what eats the afternoon.
With the data connected to your assistant, the lookup happens inside the work. Ask while you are drafting the pitch and the shows land in the draft. Ask while you are building the plan and the competitive set lands in the plan. Nothing to open.
It is read-only and free to try — 25 tool calls a day on a free account.
Ad sellers and podcast networks
Build a prospect list out of a conversation
Every brand already buying podcast ads is a warm lead: they have a budget, a creative and a promo code running. Ask your assistant which brands are on the shows that compete with yours, and you have a pitch list without opening a spreadsheet.
Prompts to try
- “Who sponsors the Glenn Beck Program?”
- “List the brands advertising on the top business podcasts, and flag any that also advertise on my show’s competitors.”
- “Which advertiser categories are buying the most podcast ads this quarter?”
- “Draft an outreach email to a brand that sponsors three shows in my category, citing where I heard them.”
Media buyers
Check a show’s sponsor history before you buy it
A rate card tells you what a show costs. Its sponsor history tells you who else has been willing to pay, whether reads are host-read or dropped in by the network, and whether advertisers come back. Ask before the call, not after the invoice.
Prompts to try
- “Which brands have advertised on this podcast in the last year, and how many times each?”
- “Is this show mostly host-read or network-inserted?”
- “Which of my competitors are already running on the shows on my media plan?”
- “Has this brand’s podcast advertising gone up or down over the last 12 months?”
Agencies
Answer a client question in the time it takes to ask it
Most client questions about podcast advertising are lookups: who is on what, since when, how often. Doing those by hand is an afternoon. Asked of an assistant with the data connected, it is a sentence — with a link to the page the number came from, so the answer survives being forwarded.
Prompts to try
- “Compare the podcast advertising of these three brands over the last year.”
- “Which shows does our client sponsor that their two closest competitors do not?”
- “Build a one-page summary of podcast advertising in the health and wellness category.”
- “Which brands started advertising on podcasts recently in our client’s category?”
Brand and PR teams
Find out where your own name is being said
Your media agency knows where they placed you. They do not know which shows mention you unprompted, which competitors are buying the shows you are not, or that a network inserted your ad somewhere off-brand. Ask directly.
Prompts to try
- “Which podcasts has our brand advertised on, and when was the most recent?”
- “Which podcasts do our two biggest competitors sponsor that we do not?”
- “Has our podcast advertising increased since January?”
- “Which categories are our competitors buying into that we have not tried?”
What it will and will not tell you
Strong evidence
When a brand is reported on a show, the ad was heard in an episode we transcribed. That is a detection, not an inference from a media kit, and it comes with the dates it was heard.
Not a complete census
Coverage is growing and is not complete. A show or brand missing from an answer may simply not be indexed yet. Treat every list as a floor, and ask the assistant to check coverage before you quote a total.
The current figures are public on the stats page, the detection method is written up under methodology, and you can browse the dataset by hand in the Advertiser Index.
Questions
- How do I ask my assistant these questions?
- Connect the free Track Podcasts MCP server once, then type the question normally. Your assistant decides when to call the data and when not to — you never name a tool. Setup is at trackpodcasts.com/mcp.
- Does it cost anything?
- A free Track Podcasts account includes 25 tool calls a day, which covers a working session of questions. No card, and connecting does not start or use up a trial. Paid plans raise the limit and add the verbatim ad read with its promo code and timestamp.
- How reliable are the answers?
- Sponsorships are detected in transcribed audio, so a brand is reported only when the ad was actually heard in an episode we transcribed. That makes a positive finding strong evidence. The reverse is not true: coverage is growing and is not complete, so a missing show or brand means we have not indexed it, not that the sponsorship never happened. Every answer carries that caveat and a link to the page behind it.
- Can my assistant get the verbatim ad read?
- On a paid plan, yes — the quote, the promo code and the timestamp in the episode. On the free plan it gets the brands, the counts, the dates and whether reads were host-read or network-inserted, but not the quote.
- Is my data or my prompts stored?
- We log that a key made a call so we can count it against the daily limit. The tools are read-only: nothing an assistant does can change your account or anything in the dataset.
- Can I get this over a normal API instead?
- Yes. The same data is available over a REST API on paid plans, documented on the API page. The MCP server exists so you can ask in English rather than write a client.
Try it on your own accounts
Connect in two minutes and ask about the brands and shows you already care about.