Which Podcasts Actually Book Outside Guests? Guest-Openness Scores for 314 Shows

An openly licensed dataset of 314 podcasts scored on how open they are to booking outside guests, built from each show's own public RSS feed and its public Apple Podcasts listing. Anyone who wants to be a guest on a podcast faces the same question and has no data to answer it: of the shows in my niche, which ones actually book outside guests, and which are a host talking alone or a closed network production? This dataset answers that question for 314 shows across 14 niches. What is in it One row per show, 314 rows, 14 niches. Columns: slug, show_name, publisher, niche, niche_name, genre, episode_count, cadence, last_episode_at, active, publishes_guest_evidence, network_run, dormant, openness_score (0 to 100), feed_checked_at, apple_url. Identical content is provided as CSV and as JSON. Method For each show we fetched its public RSS feed and read four things the show publishes about itself: whether recent episode titles or its own description show that it books guests; how long since it last published; how often it publishes; and whether the author is an independent creator or a network. Those four combine into a blunt, public 0 to 100 openness_score. Feeds that could not be read are excluded from the file rather than counted as absent evidence. What the corpus says 259 of 314 shows are still active. 100 shows publish direct evidence that they book guests. 71 shows are dormant, and 66 are network run. Feeds checked 2026-07-11. Limits, stated plainly This measures whether the door is the kind that opens. It does not predict whether a given host will reply to you. Nothing here is a response rate. A show with no guest marker in its recent titles is not proven to be guest free. Some interview shows credit guests in a format no parser catches, so we count published evidence and never its absence. The corpus is a sample of business, technology, health and adjacent niches, not a census of all podcasts. It skews toward established shows on the Apple charts. No contact details of any kind are included, by design. Provenance and the write up The full analysis, including per niche breakdowns, is published at https://letsmakeapodcast.com/research/which-podcasts-book-guests. The scored shows are browsable at https://letsmakeapodcast.com/podcasts. Both are maintained by Let's Make A Podcast, a marketplace matching podcast hosts with guests. The same openness_score in this file is the score our own search ranks on, so it can be checked against any show's feed. Licensed CC BY 4.0: use it, build on it, please cite it.