As we close out 2025, it feels like the right moment to pause and look back at what has been an important year for All Ears. Not just in numbers, but in how spoken media has become impossible to ignore.

For years, text dominated how brands tried to understand the world. Social posts, comments, articles, and reports. But the real conversation was already moving elsewhere. Into podcasts, social media, interviews, livestreams, and short-form clips.

By 2025, that shift was no longer subtle or happening in the background. It was undeniable.

The year spoken media went mainstream

Many people will remember 2024 as the year podcasts fully stepped into the spotlight. Or maybe it is just us, a little biased after a year of listening. Either way, podcasts moved from a side format to a primary communication channel during the US election cycle. The Trump campaign largely sidelined traditional media in favor of long-form conversations on celebrity podcasts and livestreaming platforms like Twitch.

It echoed what we had seen before. In 2016, Twitter reshaped political communication. In 2024, podcasts did the same.

That momentum carried straight into 2025. Around 584.1 million people globally listened to podcasts this year, an increase of roughly 7 percent year over year. Spoken media did not just grow. It normalized. It became a place where opinions are formed, narratives take shape, and trust is built or lost.

Creators spoke more, audiences listened longer, and brands realized that typed text only tells part of the story. Tone, emotion, and context are what explain why people think what they think. Those signals live in voice and spoken media.

At All Ears, our mission has remained simple but ambitious. To index the world’s spoken conversations and make them searchable, analyzable, and actionable.

In 2025, that mission ran at full speed.

By the numbers: listening at a new scale

In 2025, we:

• Listening to over 10+ millions hours of spoken media, the equivalent of over 1,100+m years of continuous listening

• Ran 30,300 archive searches to understand past conversations

• Created 27,000 alerts to stay ahead of emerging narratives

• Generated 44,000 reports to turn listening into decisions

Full coverage, more languages

In 2025, we reached 100% podcast coverage on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) for Finnish, German, French, Italian, and Dutch (Netherlands).

In 2024, we reached 100% coverage for English-language podcasts and in 2025 we expanded that milestone across five more major languages.

Where the conversation lived

Spoken media now spans many formats, but one thing was clear in 2025. Long-form conversations still carry the deepest signal.

The majority of listening time on the All Ears platform came from podcasts and long-form audio, complemented by rapidly growing volumes of video and short-form spoken content across platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

Shipping while listening

Scale alone does not matter without progress. In 2025, we shipped 424 product updates across the All Ears platform. These releases improved how teams discover mentions, track narratives, analyze sentiment, and move from raw conversation to clear insight. We also continued expanding how All Ears can be accessed, from the web platform to APIs and mobile access.

From faster indexing to better reporting and smarter alerts, the focus stayed the same. Help teams understand what is being said before it shows up elsewhere.

Expanding what it means to listen

As spoken media continues to evolve, so does our definition of where important conversations happen.

In 2025, we expanded our indexing beyond the platforms we are traditionally known for and into spaces where influence, policy, and professional narratives take shape every day.

We began indexing Europe’s parliaments, including Sveriges riksdag and Stortinget in Norway, capturing public discourse where decisions and narratives intersect.

At the same time, we expanded our language coverage by adding Spanish and Portuguese podcasts to better support a global spoken conversation.

Building for teams that want to build on All Ears

This year was not only about serving insights in the product. It was also about making All Ears easier to plug into the workflows and tools teams already use.

In 2025, we took a big step forward with our API. The goal is simple. Let partners and builders bring spoken media intelligence into their own products, dashboards, and internal systems without rebuilding the same plumbing again and again.

With the All Ears APIs, teams can build on top of our spoken media index to:

• Pull spoken media mentions and results programmatically

• Automate monitoring and workflows with alerts and triggers

• Enrich internal reporting with voice-first intelligence

• Power integrations and white-label use cases where spoken insight needs to live inside another product

We are excited about what this unlocks for partners, agencies, and teams building the next generation of intelligence workflows.

Looking ahead

If 2025 was the year spoken media proved its scale, 2026 will be the year it proves its strategic value.

We will continue building the infrastructure behind voice-first intelligence. Indexing more conversations, improving how insight is surfaced, and helping teams listen with clarity instead of noise.

Wishing you all the best,
The All Ears team