How to spot Google Podcasts in your server logs

We were curious: it turns out that Google Podcasts is harder to spot than many podcast apps.

Here’s the definitive guide on how to spot Google Podcasts in your podcast logs. You need to check both the user agent and the referrer to do this accurately.

Web (desktop and mobile)

• The referrer will be https://podcasts.google.com/

Here’s an example from a user on Google Chrome on a Mac:

UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.198 Safari/537.36
Referrer: https://podcasts.google.com/

… it looks like a normal browser (because it is), but the referrer is always set.

iOS app

• The useragent will start “GooglePodcasts” (this includes both Google Podcasts iOS app and Assistant iOS app traffic)

UA: GooglePodcasts/2.0.7 iPhone/14.1 hw/iPhone12_1
Referrer: -

Android app

• The useragent will include the string GSA/[VERSION] (this includes both Google Podcasts Android app and Assistant Android app traffic)

UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; Pixel 3a XL Build/QQ3A.200805.001; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/86.0.4240.198 Mobile Safari/537.36 GSA/11.38.8.23.arm64
Referrer: -

Assistant screenless devices (eg Google Home)

• The useragent will include the string CrKey/[VERSION]

UA: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux armv7l) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4147.125 Safari/537.36 CrKey/1.50.229149
RSS slug:bot.google.com
Referrer: https://www.gstatic.com/narrative_cast_receiver/podcasts/receiver.html?feature=2

• If you’re also in Google News updates, those look similar, but the referrer includes feature=1 rather than feature=2.

• If you use a voice action (what some people call 'a skill’), you may see Google-Speech-Actions. These are unlikely to appear for full podcasts, but might appear for a few small audio clips.

Google’s bots

You should discard any downloads made directly by the Googlebot or similar services, which will occasionally automatically download your audio for analysis.

This page contains the useragents that Google uses. Podnews has seen AdsBot-Google, Googlebot, Googlebot-Video, and others.

RSS feeds

If you check RSS user-agents, then Googlebot is used to parse all RSS feeds for Google Podcasts.

Useragents that Google used to use

GoogleChirp - once the codename for Google’s home speaker. This is no longer used for anything related to Google Podcasts or Google Assistant.

Google-Podcast - once the thing that Google Play Music Podcasts used to use to grab your audio, once per episode. This is now closed.