Profanities/Swearing
Damian Moore, Last updated: 15 October 2026
Depending on your audience or syndication partners you may choose to bleep out or silence swearing on your show. It can have a reputational cost if you accidentally leave them in. If you’re OK with swearing left in you still might be required to tag your episode as “Explicit” when uploading to platforms such as Spotify.
Our machine learning matches up speech with a list of words we have in our system and then highlights them. Any detected swear words should be shown as markers in the player at the top of the screen and you can click to hear them right away.
You should bear in mind that this system works based on probability and should not be relied upon entirely without your own proofing or note-taking during recording. There may be profanities or offensive terms that aren’t in our checklist or that weren’t recognised by the algorithm.
Finding swearing in the transcript
As well as the amber markers on the player, each swear word is tagged on the transcript phrase it occurs in, with the word itself underlined, so you can read it in context before deciding whether to bleep it. Click the tag to open that finding in the Profanities check. Our transcripts now also label who is speaking, which helps when you’re working out whose line needs an edit — see podcast transcripts with speaker names and our transcription model update.
We match on whole words regardless of capitals. Mild words such as “damn” and “hell” aren’t on our list, and censored transcriptions such as “f**k” still count.
The explicit flag
Swearing on its own doesn’t have to be a problem — but swearing in an episode that isn’t marked explicit can be. That’s what the separate Explicit flag check looks for, and it’s Required in every built-in standard:
- It fails only when the episode contains swearing and the episode isn’t marked explicit in your feed’s
itunes:explicittag. A swearing episode that is marked explicit passes. - A missing
itunes:explicittag counts as not explicit, the same way podcast apps read it. - Only swearing heard with 75% confidence or more counts. Lower-confidence hits still show in the Profanities check, marked “Low confidence — didn’t fail the explicit flag”, so you can listen and judge for yourself.
- Uploads aren’t checked, as there’s no feed to read the flag from.
- The flag is re-read each time we poll your feed, for as long as the episode is the newest one. If you mark it explicit in your hosting platform, the report turns green on its own after the next poll.
If you’re aiming for a clean show, our guide to ensuring your podcast is family friendly covers the wider picture.
Making it stricter
Profanities is Informational in the built-in standards, so it’s shown but doesn’t fail the report. In a custom standard you can make it Required so any swearing fails the report outright, or turn on Unwanted words with a list of up to 50 words or phrases of your own — anything you don’t want said on the show.
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Photo courtesy of Guillaume de Germain
