Sometimes it's good to live in a region that no one cares about. I just searched for Firefox in the Android Play Store application, there were no ads, and the first result was Firefox.

I also don't get any ads in American and UK podcasts for the same reason (except for those read by the host, but there are few of those and they're easy to ignore).

On iOS App Store at least, my observation is they just show you a random irrelevant ad at the top if there’s no one specifically bidding for the term. Well that’s my assumption for why I get irrelevant <app with deep pocket> ads when I search for obscure terms. But maybe they don’t show an ad if there’s no bidder at all for garbage spots in <country>?

That's interesting. I wish it were more practical to use a dedicated VPN for some less-developed country just for my podcast client.

Can you tell us which region are you in? (Iceland?)

Does anyone publish a scorecard of search results vs Google region settings?

Podcasts are normally plain mp3 (or similar) files that get downloaded as-is off an rss feed, as far as I understand. I don’t think anyone gets extra ads outside the sponsored/host-read ones.