com.apple.podcasts.SpotlightIndexExtension is using approx 100% cpu continuously

I'm also seeing unusual CPU activity with this process. Despite not downloading any podcasts to my macbook (I do follow and listen to many shows on my other ios devices, and have automatic downloads of all new episodes set up on those devices--just not the macbook in which I'm seeing this issue) I've noticed via iStat Menus, and activity monitor that com.apple.podcasts.SpotlightIndexExtension process is constantly between 9 and 15% of CPU at any given time (if I change the parameter in iStat Menus to represnt the CPU values on a 0-800% scale, I see it sitting anywhere from 80 to 100% of CPU)

When viewed in activity monitor under the Disk Usage column, it seems to be doing more reading than writing--after about 13 minutes of running in the background it had read 2GB of data, but only written about 65KB of data to the hard drive.

I've rebuilt the spotlight index, rebooted in safe mode multiple times, force quit the process multiple times (and always after a few moments, the process starts back up again) at this point, I'm drawing a complete blank as to what the issue could be.

My machine is an M2 Macbook Air 13" with 16GB RAM, 10 Core GPU, 512SSD and I'm running macOS 15.5. (edited to add in screenshots of CPU usage)

this is happening in macos tahoe 26 too, very high disk write too

I noticed the same problem while investigating a huge spotlight database of 50GB at ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/

Podcasts should really be indexing anything since I have no podcasts downloaded at all. I deleted the 5 podcasts container folders and teh 1 group container, killed every podcasts process. And now upon restarting the Podcasts app it is now the one using 100% CPU instead of com.apple.podcasts.SpotlightIndexExtension lol so we can't win!

I've been having the same issue and finally figured out how to stop it. If you find the com.apple.podcasts.SpotlightIndexExtension process in Activity Monitor you can click the Info icon at the top and find it's Open Files and Ports. Among the paths listed are a couple of cache folders based out of $HOME/Library/Containers and $HOME/Library/Group Containers. Removing those folders caused it to stop using 100% CPU on my machine.

Took me ages but I found a way to stop it: Open the podcasts app, navigate to Settings (listed under 'Podcasts' on the top bar, next to the Apple logo), go to Advanced, and uncheck 'Show Siri suggestions'.

Hello, i found a solution (all others methods did not worked for me) :

1. Open System Settings (or System Preferences on older macOS versions).
2. Go to the Apple Intelligence & Siri section.
3. Go to "Siri, Dictée et confidentialité"
4. Find Podcasts in the list and uncheck the box next to it.
5. Kill the com.apple.podcasts.SpotlightIndexExtension process that were running and you should be good.

Hope this helps others!

[Edited by Moderator]

Anyone else having this issue? I've noticed over the last few days my computer's fan has been going crazy and com.apple.podcasts.SpotlightIndexExtension is the reason. It's using 99% cpu and I've tried everything suggested in this post, including the Siri Suggestions ticker in the Podcasts app, and nothing is working! I don't even use the Podcasts app. I'm on 15.6. Might try reinstalling the OS to see if that helps.

Get FindAnyFile, hold Option key when selecting find button, search for, name contains…

com.apple.podcasts.spotlight

do you find a file you can delete & restart?

Yeah that’s the file, in Activity Monitor can you force quit it?

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