2x the MCP tools—pick which ones you want

Hello,

Here’s what’s new in the Podcast Intelligence API since last week.

🚨Important API update 🚨

We’ve seen feedback that the /podcast/search endpoint is confusing. Currently, it searches for dialog within podcasts, but many of you use it to search for podcasts by name. (To search for podcasts, you currently need to use /podcasts?q=[query]). Today, we are introducing /podcasts/episodes/search to search for episodes. It’s exactly the same as the current /podcast/search. On Monday, June 8, we will be changing /podcasts/search to search for podcasts, as people seem to expect.

tl;dr: If you are using /podcasts/search to search for episodes,
it’s time to move to /podcasts/episodes/search

🆕 What's new:

• Find out when new episodes drop for a fraction of the price: /podcasts/episodes/feed Instead of separate requests for a list of episodes for each podcast you’re tracking, you can now make a single request for up to 100 podcasts and only get back the new episodes since the last time you checked.

• Real-time episode firehose (for Enterprise customers): /podcasts/episodes/stream is now live as a streaming SSE endpoint that pushes episodes as they’re available for the entire corpus. Reach out to api@particle.pro for more information on Enterprise plans.

• Guests as first-class entities: With the new /podcasts/guests set of endpoints, you can search the guest directory by topic, podcast, or recency; pull lifetime appearance history and top shows for any guest; and explore the overlap between guests, hosts, and the companies they're associated with.

• Ratings & reviews: With the two new ratings endpoints, you can now find up-to-date and historical ratings and reviews, along with sentiment summaries with filters for minimum stars and more.

• /podcasts/lookup lets you use identifiers you already have, such as iTunes IDs and RSS feeds, to perform bulk lookups for the corresponding podcast in our system.

• Better filtering on podcasts and episodes:

  • New popularity_threshold filter and popularity field on /v1/podcasts — slice to A-list, mid-tail, or anything in between without post-filtering.

  • New topic_ids filter on the episode feed for topical streams.

  • Numeric iTunes IDs are now accepted anywhere a podcast ID is used — alongside slugs and UUIDs — so you don't need to resolve before you query.

• MCP Upgrades: We’ve doubled the number of tools available from the MCP server, without filling the context window.

  • Tools now include guest appearances, rankings, ratings, political bias, and brand suitability.

  • You can opt-in to the subset of tools you care about. Full tool reference here.

  • Additionally, MCP requests and the specific tools invoked now appear in your Request Logs.

Let's get in touch! Reply here with questions, concerns, or any feedback.

Best,
Team Particle