7% of Fortune 500 homepages link to a podcast. The industry figure is 38%

Key findings

1. 33 of 472 Fortune 500 homepages link a podcast, 7.0%. The figure that circulates in podcast roundups is 38% of the Fortune 500 with a branded podcast.
2. Unicorns lead the four lists at 12.3% (123 of 1,000), then the Inc 5000 at 10.1% (494 of 4,885), the Fortune 500 at 7.0% and Y Combinator companies at 3.3% (176 of 5,386).
3. Across all 11,743 homepages, 101 link Spotify and 69 link Apple Podcasts. Spotify leads in every group where either platform clears five domains.
4. Security has the highest share of any Inc 5000 industry we publish, 22.0% of 82 companies. Construction is at 2.6% of 305, and none of the 24 Aerospace & Aviation companies links a podcast.
5. 5.1% of the 840 Y Combinator companies in the 2012-17 block link a podcast, against 0.7% of the 1,248 in the 2025-26 block.
6. The Fortune 500 rank bands barely move: 8.2% of ranks 1 to 100, 6.3% of 101 to 250 and 6.9% of 251 to 500.

We went looking for the Fortune 500 number because the 38% claim gets quoted everywhere and we could not find a list of companies behind it. Ours counts something narrower, a link on the homepage, so we expected it to come in lower. We did not expect a fifth of the size, and we did not expect the Fortune 500 to sit behind both the unicorn list and the Inc 5000. The Y Combinator numbers surprised us too: podcast links there fall by batch year, so the newest companies are the least likely in the crawl to point at a show.

33 of 472 Fortune 500 homepages link a podcast, 7.0%

Source: Installmap, September 2026.

The denominator is the 472 companies of the 500 whose homepage we archived with a status under 400 and a non-empty body. All 33 positives were opened in the stored HTML and read by hand.

The 38% comes from one podcast statistics roundup, Searchlab's "Podcast Statistics 2026" (section 06), which attributes it to BBC Global News; we read it on 2026-09-04 at https://searchlab.nl/en/statistics/podcast-statistics-2026 and found no company list behind it.

The two counts measure different things, so 7.0% against 38% does not show that either number is wrong. Searchlab counts companies that have a branded podcast, wherever it lives. We count companies that link one from the homepage. If the 38% holds, most of those shows are not linked from the homepage. A show reached only through a newsroom page or a resources hub counts for their measure and not for ours.

The 33 companies, and the biggest name among them is Cardinal Health at rank 15

Of the top 20 Fortune 500 companies by rank, one links a podcast: Cardinal Health, for Counter Talk. Amazon, Walmart, UnitedHealth Group, Apple, Alphabet, CVS Health, Berkshire Hathaway, McKesson, ExxonMobil Holdings, Cencora, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, Costco Wholesale, Cigna Group, Nvidia, Meta Platforms, Elevance Health, Centene and Bank of America do not. By rank, the named shows start with Counter Talk (15), The Energy Tailgate (21), Goldman Sachs Exchanges (36) and Thoughts on the Market (39).

Nine of the 33 homepages link a podcast hub without naming a show. One company, Chevron, links a platform straight from the homepage, to Apple Podcasts and Spotify for The Energy Tailgate. The other 32 link a page on their own domain, so the Fortune 500 platform-link count prints as <5.

Unicorns lead at 12.3% and Y Combinator companies trail at 3.3%

Almost all of it is the same-site path signal, P2: 11.2% of unicorns (112), 8.9% of the Inc 5000 (435), 7.0% of the Fortune 500 (33) and 2.8% of the YC list (149). A direct platform link, P1, runs 2.1% on the Inc 5000 (105), 1.5% among unicorns (15), 0.7% on the YC list (40) and under five Fortune 500 domains. Embeds, P3, reach 0.3% of the Inc 5000 (15), 0.0% of the YC list, 0.0% of the Fortune 500 and under five unicorn domains.

Spotify is on 101 homepages and Apple Podcasts on 69

Shares are over all 11,743 scored homepages: 0.9% Spotify, 0.6% Apple Podcasts, 0.1% each for YouTube, Amazon Music and Buzzsprout, 0.0% for Pocket Casts and Transistor. Spotify leads Apple Podcasts 70 to 54 on the Inc 5000, 22 to 10 on the YC list and 8 to <5 among unicorns. Google Podcasts, shut down in 2024, is still linked from fewer than five homepages. Embeds are rare: 19 domains, 12 an RSS feed tagged as a podcast, 5 a Spotify player and the other two a different player.

Security firms in the Inc 5000 link a podcast at 22.0%, Construction at 2.6%

Security tops the table at 22.0% of 82 companies, then Artificial Intelligence & Data 19.2% of 125, Legal 17.8% of 185, Advertising, Marketing & PR 17.3% of 439, Software 16.9% of 350, Media, Arts & Entertainment 16.7% of 36, Financial Services 15.5% of 412, Business & Corporate Services 12.2% of 311, Healthcare & Medical 10.6% of 424, Business Products 10.0% of 60, Human Resources 9.8% of 133, Real Estate 8.0% of 112, Education 8.0% of 88, Insurance 7.9% of 89, IT Services 7.5% of 389, Logistics & Transportation 5.1% of 156, Consumer Products 5.0% of 262, Manufacturing 4.5% of 154 and Construction 2.6% of 305. None of the 24 Aerospace & Aviation companies links a podcast.

Eight more industries with 20 or more companies have fewer than five positives, so their share prints as <5: Food & Beverage (168 companies), Government Services (158), Consumer Services (125), Energy & Utilities (62), Travel & Hospitality (55), Telecommunications (54), Engineering (45) and Environmental Services (36). Automotive, Biotech & Pharmaceuticals, Computers & Technology, Agriculture and Business Products & Services fall under the base of 20 we publish at all.

Podcast links on YC homepages fall from 5.1% in the 2012-17 block to 0.7% in 2025-26

The 2012-17 and 2018-21 blocks are level at 5.1%, across 840 and 1,529 companies, and the fall starts at 2.8% of 567 in 2022. Then 3.2% of 441 in 2023, 1.6% of 550 in 2024 and 0.7% of 1,248 in 2025-26. The 211 companies outside 2012-26 come in at 3.3%.

The Fortune 500 rank bands sit between 6.3% and 8.2%

Eight of the 97 largest companies link a podcast, nine of the next 142 and 16 of the smallest 233. We expected rank to matter more than 1.9 points.

The other three lists give 15 named homepages that link a platform directly

The first five by domain among the platform-link positives in each group. The unicorn list carries no company names.

How we counted

We archived every homepage on 2026-09-04 over a proxy pool that rotates IPs, sending a browser user agent, and rendered each page in a headless browser. Nothing was fetched to produce this post. We ran a pass over the 12,364 stored records.

349 of the 12,713 domains had no scored record at all, 28 of them in the Fortune 500, and 621 records came back unusable, 583 of them Y Combinator domains that now answer 404, 403 or 502. A plain fetch stood in for 216 companies, all Inc 5000 or YC.

Three rules, each measured on the homepage only. A platform link is an anchor pointing at one of 30 podcast platforms; YouTube counts only when the anchor text says podcast, and an itunes.apple.com link only when the URL says podcast. A same-site path is an anchor on the company's own domain whose URL path or visible text contains "podcast". An embed is a player iframe or a link rel=alternate RSS feed tagged as a podcast. A company counts once if any of the three fires.

Reading all 35 Fortune 500 positives by hand found two wrong, both rule bugs, so we changed the rules and reran everything. A platform name containing a dot is now matched against the parsed host rather than anywhere in the URL, because acast.com inside bofa.veracast.com was counting Freeport-McMoRan's investor webcast as a podcast. And six path segments are excluded by name (apple-podcasts, google-podcasts, podcast-app, podcasts-app, podcast-player-app, podcast-hosting), because apple.com links /apple-podcasts/, the product page for the app. The fixes took the Fortune 500 from 35 (7.4%) to 33 (7.0%), YC from 179 to 176 and the Inc 5000 from 495 to 494, left the unicorns at 123, and changed six domains. One of them, shinkei.systems, is a real Apple Podcasts link we now miss, because an email security gateway had rewritten the href.

For the rest we read 25 random positives per signal in the stored HTML, seed 1, drawn before the rule fix across all four groups. The platform link rule returned one false positive in 25 and the same-site path rule one in 25, 4.0% each; the embed signal has only 19 positives, all checked, none wrong.

The crawler caps a stored page at about 1.5 million characters, and 588 records hit the cap: 263 Inc 5000 (5.4%), 228 YC (4.2%), 22 Fortune 500 (4.7%) and 75 unicorns (7.5%). A podcast link past the cap is invisible here, so every count is a floor. Every figure in this post counts a link on a homepage. We do not know from this data whether a company without one runs a show elsewhere.

Dataset

The metric rows and every positive domain are published under /static/data/fortune-500-podcast-links/ as data.csv, a README.md with the columns and denominators, and a METHOD.md with the crawl, the rules, the fixes and the floors. Data: CC BY 4.0, Installmap, September 2026.