The top true-crime podcasts in 2025

• 2025's best true crime podcasts have been announced by the true crime review podcast Crime Writers On. The podcast has reviewed more than a thousand true-crime and crime-adjacent podcasts. We publish the full list today.

• iOS podcast app Castro has blocked Inception Point AI podcasts from its app search results. In a blog post, Castro’s Dustin Bluck says that Inception Point AI “seems to be keying on popular searches in order to flood search results and deceive users.”

  • Is the accusation fair? A search in Apple Podcasts for Charlie Kirk brings up four shows from Inception Point AI in the results - Charlie Kirk Biography Flash, Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk Death and Charlie Kirk Manhunt. The company’s CEO, Jeanine Wright - who is a former legal attorney - has been clear about the company’s SEO policy, saying in an interview for the Podnews Weekly Review podcast: “When people typed Charlie Kirk into Apple and Spotify, we were three of the top five shows - even beating out the Daily Mail.” Only one of those shows makes any mention of AI in the audio; another claims it has “personal interviews” and “a team of expert researchers and journalists”.
  • As of checking today, Inception Point AI’s biography channel contains 733 shows; the vast majority of which are, according to the company, not checked by humans before publishing.

• Apple released iOS v26.2 at the end of last week. In Apple Podcasts, it rolls out automated chapters for every podcast, as well as “timed links”, which is particularly helpful for guests, allowing links to their podcasts to appear when they’re mentioned in the audio. We’ve updated our FAQ. The v26.2 update also includes more than 25 different security fixes, so we’d suggest you update as soon as you’re able to.

  • To update your iPhone or iPad to v26.2, open the Settings app, choose “General” then “Software Update”, and pull down the screen to check for the latest. (Do it from a fast wifi connection!)

• Spotify for Creators released a new set of terms and conditions. The company has sent an email explaining the key updates; the full changes are highlighted here.

  • There’s clarification on music content within podcasts, which now says that it’s fine if it’s been cleared for use (by you) on the Spotify platform. Previously, you weren’t allowed music at all.
  • Dynamically inserted ads in your podcast must now be compliant with Spotify’s Advertising Policies. Previously it was just “embedded” advertising, not “inserted” advertising.

• In the UK, audio research company RAJAR has released Autumn 2025's MIDAS survey, focusing on all audio consumption in the country. It says that the total number of podcast listeners in the UK has remained steady at 24% of the adult population per week. The average podcast listener aged 15+ consumes 9 hours of podcasts every week: that’s a total of 127 million hours listening to podcasts each week in the UK. (In the US, for ages 13+, 773 million hours of podcasts are listened to each week).

  • Comedy is the #1 genre; men listen to “news and politics” shows just as much as comedy, but women listen to half as much news/politics as men.
  • 88% “claim to listen to all or mostly all of each episode” that they listen to, with 78% getting around to listening “to more than half of all the episodes they have downloaded”. (This survey therefore suggests that at least 12% of downloads are never listened-to.)

• If you produce post-campaign analysis for your advertisers manually, Podscribe has added a tool that automatically produces client-ready Google Slides presentations, directly from the dashboard. The company has also added lookalike audience discovery, to check on show overlap and increase frequency for advertisers.

• Expect more podcasts from the Nachum Segal Network, after they signed with Zeno Plus for podcast, broadcast and digital transformation.

• The Optimal Living Daily podcast is celebrating its tenth anniversary - without missing a single episode in the past ten years.

• Robin Ince has resigned from the popular podcast The Infinite Monkey Cage, and has recorded his last show. The show is one of the top 25 shows in the UK. He suggests “his opinions outside the BBC have been considered problematic for some time”.

For a story - Podnews is looking for people who have had libellous or unpleasant reviews placed on their Apple Podcasts listing, and their experiences with Apple support when trying to get them removed. We won’t mention your show and will keep you anonymous. editor@podnews.net

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• If you use Hugo as a static website generator, Hugo Cards Podcast will let you host a podcast with it and supports many of the Podcasting 2.0 features as well.

• Our sponsor RSS.com has launched a public API, which allows podcast networks to automate publishing and build integrations with other tools. The fully-featured API - documentation here - even includes the dataset for the company’s market-leading location metadata feature.

  • The company has also tweaked its automatic mid-roll ads, using data from chapter points to give better placement for the ads.

Moves and hires

• Natalie Diezyn has been confirmed as Head of Brand for SickBird Productions, the female-led content studio based in Toronto, Canada. She joins from The Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros., and the TARO Group.

Our Editor is an advisor for RSS.com which appears in a story today.

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: Rule Breaker Investing is a weekly show hosted by David Gardner, who shares his insights into today’s most innovative and disruptive publicly traded companies -- and how to profit from them by following his signature “Rule Breaker Investing” principles.

Bravely, The 615 Switch is using voice cloning technology in a new comedy podcast set in Nashville’s country music industry. While the script is written by a human, the production company, Audio Up, hasn’t used traditional voice actors.

On This Upbeat Life, Simon JJ Green talks to ordinary people about their health and lives, and takes a cheeky look the health & wellness industry. What’s the deal beind those weird TikTok health trends? And what’s the meaning of happiness… and how do we find it?

And Well Beyond Medicine features conversational interviews with health care leaders, policymakers, community partners, and experts who are driving collaboration and innovation to improve children’s health across the US and around the world; with new video episodes recorded at HLTH 2025 in Las Vegas.

Having a bad DAI

An occasional section where we highlight odd things going on with podcast ads so we all get better at them. Send screen recordings to editor@podnews.net

Back in March, Science Stuff thought it would be fun to schedule two pieces of copy for the same product back to back. (Does anyone know where to find AI built for business that might have fixed that?)