Free Tool
RSS Feed Health Checker
Paste your podcast feed and get a scored report in seconds — every problem in plain English, with the fix. Checks the things Apple and Spotify reject feeds for, plus the ones that quietly break your download numbers.
What it checks
Around sixty checks in seven areas. Everything is graded by what it actually costs you: a missing artwork file can get the show rejected outright, a missing podcast:transcript tag costs you nothing today.
Feed delivery
Whether platforms can reach and read the feed at all.
XML & namespaces
Whether the file parses and declares what it needs to.
Show details
The channel-level tags Apple rejects feeds for missing.
Artwork
The single most common cause of rejection.
Episodes
Checked across every episode in the feed.
Audio files
Sampled — the 10 most recent plus 5 chosen at random.
Modern feed features
Podcasting 2.0 tags. Nothing here is required by any platform, so nothing here can fail — it only ever adds to your score.
The three problems worth knowing about
Most feed faults are cosmetic. These three are not, and all three are invisible until something has already gone wrong.
CMYK artwork
Apple requires artwork in the RGB colour space. A JPEG exported from print software is usually CMYK, and it looks completely normal in Finder, in your browser and in your host's preview. Apple rejects it without explaining why, which is how people end up re-uploading the same file for a week. The checker reads the colour space out of the image itself rather than trusting the file extension.
Unstable GUIDs
If your GUIDs contain a timestamp, a version number or a cache-busting parameter, they change when the feed regenerates. Every platform then treats every episode as brand new: listeners get your entire back catalogue pushed at them again, and your download figures stop meaning anything. The checker looks at every GUID in the feed for the patterns that cause this.
Broken enclosures
The audio URL in the feed is the only thing that actually delivers the episode. If it 404s, redirects endlessly, or declares the wrong file size, players fail in ways that look like listener-side problems. The checker fetches sampled audio files and reports what the server really returns — including whether it supports the byte-range requests that let apps seek.
How the score works
Checks are weighted by consequence. Anything that can get a feed rejected counts for five times what a nice-to-have counts for, and a feed with even one of those problems is capped at 49 however good the rest of it is. A score in the nineties with a critical failure sitting underneath it would be a comfortable lie, and the whole point of the tool is to tell you the thing you didn’t know.
Podcasting 2.0 tags are scored separately and can only ever add to the total. Nothing in that section can fail, because no platform requires any of it — a perfectly healthy, fully compliant feed with none of those tags still scores well.
Every result comes with what it means and what to do about it. Where there is official guidance from Apple or the Podcasting 2.0 spec, the report links straight to it rather than paraphrasing.
Common questions
Why was my podcast rejected by Apple?
Almost always the artwork. Apple requires a square JPEG or PNG between 1400×1400 and 3000×3000 pixels, in the RGB colour space, served over HTTPS. A CMYK JPEG is the classic silent rejection: it looks perfect in every browser and every preview, and Apple refuses it without telling you why. After artwork, the next most common causes are a missing itunes:category, a category name that isn't one of Apple's exact strings, and a feed served over plain HTTP.
What is a podcast GUID and why does it matter?
The GUID is the permanent identifier for an episode. Every platform uses it to decide whether it is looking at a new episode or one it already has. If your host regenerates GUIDs — because a timestamp, version number or cache-busting parameter is baked into them — every episode looks new every time the feed is polled. Listeners get a phantom back catalogue re-appearing in their app, and your download figures become meaningless. It is the single most damaging feed problem there is, and it is almost invisible until it happens.
How do I fix a podcast feed that isn't updating?
Work outwards. First confirm the feed itself returns HTTP 200 over HTTPS and that the newest episode is actually in the XML — plenty of 'not updating' reports are a scheduling setting in the host, not a feed fault. Then check the redirect chain: platforms follow redirects, but long chains get truncated and some aggregators give up. Then check pubDate is a valid RFC 2822 date, since a malformed or future-dated pubDate can hide an episode entirely. This checker tests all three.
Does this store my feed URL?
A feed URL is public by definition — it is the address you give to Apple, Spotify and every listener. Results are cached for a few hours against a hash of the URL so re-opening a report costs nothing, and then they expire. There is no account, no email capture and no tracking of who checked what.
What is Podcasting 2.0 and do I need it?
Podcasting 2.0 is a set of newer RSS tags — podcast:guid, podcast:transcript, podcast:funding, podcast:person and others — supported by apps like Fountain, Podverse and Podcast Addict. No mainstream platform requires any of it. That is why nothing in that section of the report can fail: those checks only ever add to your score. Treat them as opportunities, not obligations.
How many episodes does the checker look at?
Every episode in the feed is checked for structural problems — missing GUIDs, bad dates, missing enclosures — because those checks are cheap and a problem in episode 200 matters as much as one in episode 2. The audio files themselves are sampled rather than downloaded in full: the ten most recent plus five spread across the archive. Fetching a thousand audio files would take an hour and hammer your host for no extra insight.
Why we built this
Every show we take on starts with reading its feed, and the same handful of problems come up over and over — usually on shows that have been running for years without anyone noticing. The existing validators tell you a tag is missing. They don’t tell you that the missing tag is why your episodes appear a day late, or that your artwork is in the wrong colour space, or that your download graph has been fiction since your host migration.
So this reports in plain English, with the fix attached. It is free and it always will be. If you get to the end of the report and decide you’d rather someone else dealt with all of this, the services and rates are published openly. Otherwise there are more free tools — including a show notes generator and a launch checklist — and the blog covers editing, audio quality and podcast SEO.