[StillBored]

Well the question I don't see answered anywhere is how well this actually works. For some podcasts where the ad's are per-recorded and played across a couple different podcasts it seems the problem is pretty easy to solve.

OTOH, I've seen a number of youtube and podcasts where the Ads are read by the hosts as part of the show and are unique for each podcast. I heard one once recently where the host must have had 10 different versions of their travel ad, for the same place worded in slightly different ways. Maybe they were just ad'libing them. Either way, I have a hard time believing this can be easily detected. The flow and voice intonation was such that I didn't even realize it was an ad until 3/4 way through.

[hombre_fatal]

The app has a list of the dozen podcast it works with. It doesn't work with any other. That alone should tell you the app simply identifies some sort of jingle or pattern. Or these are the podcasts that OP is willing to manually tag as each episode is released.