This report explores how guest appearances function within top-ranked podcasts and how their use varies across genres. It shows that while inviting guests is a common feature of popular shows, the practice is unevenly distributed: some podcasts rely heavily on guests while others rarely include them, and a relatively small group of recurring guests appears across many programs. The analysis highlights how guest participation reflects genre norms, production styles, and network dynamics within the podcast ecosystem.

What I did

I contributed to the computational analysis behind this report by validating and cleaning LLM-assisted extraction data used to identify guests at scale from episode descriptions, and by translating the findings into a public-facing research narrative and visuals.