# Method ## Crawl date The homepages were fetched and archived on 2026-09-04. Nothing was fetched to build this dataset: it is a pass over the stored pages. ## Fetch method One homepage per domain, fetched through a rotating proxy with a browser user agent and rendered in a headless browser, so that markup injected by tags and scripts is present. The plain fetch stands in only where there is no usable rendered record: 72 Inc 5000 domains and 144 Y Combinator domains, none in the Fortune 500 or the unicorn list. A stored page is capped at 1,500,000 characters. ## Counting rules Three signals, each measured on the archived homepage only. - **P1 podcast_link**: an anchor whose href points at one of 30 podcast platforms (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Anchor, pod.link, Amazon Music, Audible, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, Overcast, Castbox, Buzzsprout, Transistor, Libsyn, Simplecast, Megaphone, Podbean, Castos, RSS.com, Spreaker, Acast, Audioboom, Art19, Captivate, RedCircle, Podcast Addict, Podchaser). YouTube counts only when the anchor text says podcast. An `itunes.apple.com` link counts only when the URL says podcast. - **P2 podcast_path**: a same-site anchor whose URL path or visible text contains "podcast". - **P3 podcast_embed**: a player iframe (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Simplecast, Transistor, Buzzsprout, Megaphone, Podbean, Anchor, Captivate, RedCircle, Art19) or a `link rel=alternate` RSS feed whose tag says podcast. - **podcast_any** is P1 or P2 or P3. ## Two rule fixes after the hand check Every Fortune 500 positive was opened in the archived HTML and read. Two were wrong, and both were rule bugs rather than one-off noise, so the rule was changed and the whole extraction rerun. 1. **Platform literals that name a host now match on the host.** Matching `acast.com` anywhere in the URL also matches `bofa.veracast.com`, which is how Freeport-McMoRan's investor webcast counted as an Acast podcast. A literal with a dot and no slash is now compared against the parsed host, which has to equal it or end in "." plus it. One real Apple Podcasts link was lost with the fix, on a YC homepage where the anchor href was rewritten by an email security gateway (`url.avanan.click/...`), so the platform host no longer sits in the host position. 2. **A same-site path that names a podcast product is not a show.** `apple.com` links `/apple-podcasts/`, the product page for the Apple Podcasts app, and P2 read that as Apple linking a podcast. No URL rule separates a product page from a show hub in general, since `siriusxm.com/podcasts` is a real hub of shows the company distributes, so six path segments are excluded by name: `apple-podcasts`, `google-podcasts`, `podcast-app`, `podcasts-app`, `podcast-player-app` and `podcast-hosting`. The match is on a whole path segment, so `/podcasts/threat-vector` is untouched. Effect of the two fixes on podcast_any: | Group | Before | After | | --- | ---: | ---: | | Inc 5000 | 495 (10.1%) | 494 (10.1%) | | Y Combinator | 179 (3.3%) | 176 (3.3%) | | Fortune 500 | 35 (7.4%) | 33 (7.0%) | | Unicorns | 123 (12.3%) | 123 (12.3%) | The six domains that changed: apple.com and fcx.com in the Fortune 500, growthmarketingpro.com in the Inc 5000, and fastshot.ai, itunes.apple.com and shinkei.systems in the Y Combinator list. ## Hand check All 35 pre-fix Fortune 500 podcast positives were opened in the archived HTML, the matching anchor read, and a verdict recorded with the show name where the page names one. 33 were correct. The two false positives are the two the rule fix removed. Full results, with the newsletter hand check on the same homepages, in `research/drafts/owned-media/fortune500_verified.csv` in the Installmap repository. The Inc 5000, YC and unicorn positives were not hand checked one by one; a 25-domain random sample of P1 and of P2 across all four groups returned one false positive each, a 4.0% rate per signal. ## Truncation 588 of the 11,743 stored pages hit the 1,500,000 character cap: 263 Inc 5000 (5.4%), 228 Y Combinator (4.2%), 22 Fortune 500 (4.7%) and 75 unicorns (7.5%). A podcast link past the cap is invisible to this pass, so every count here is a floor. ## What the number is not Every figure is a signal on one homepage. It says a company links a podcast from its homepage. It is not a count of companies that have a podcast: a show reachable only from a newsroom page, a resources hub or a search result is not counted here, and neither is a show that was retired but still exists. ## Floors - A share is not published on a base under 20 domains; it prints `n/a`. - A count of one to four prints `<5`. ## Funnel | Step | Inc 5000 | YC | Fortune 500 | Unicorns | All | | --- | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | ---: | | Domains on the list | 4,969 | 6,133 | 500 | 1,111 | 12,713 | | Archived record scored | 4,923 | 5,969 | 472 | 1,000 | 12,364 | | Usable record, counted (base) | 4,885 | 5,386 | 472 | 1,000 | 11,743 | | No scored record | 46 | 164 | 28 | 111 | 349 | | Record unusable (status 400 or over, or empty body) | 38 | 583 | 0 | 0 | 621 | The 583 Y Combinator drops are acquired and shut down companies whose domains now answer 404, 403 or 502. ## Licence Data: CC BY 4.0, Installmap, 2026-09-04. Source: Installmap, September 2026.