Podcast SEO: Optimizing Your Show for Discoverability and AI Search Engines

Almost overnight, search has changed. The arrival of LLMs and AI search tools means that traditional SEO optimization no longer works. It used to be that a well-crafted title and the use of appropriate keywords could make a site rise in search results for its topic, but AI search tools don't use the same techniques.

In this article, we look at what you can do to enhance the discoverability of your podcast with today's AI search tools.

From chatbot to AI search

In late 2022, ChatGPT-3 was released, revealing the power of AI chatbots. Trained on huge corpora of data, ChatGPT could seemingly hold a conversation with a user, answering questions and providing information. It had limitations: it hallucinated often (made things up when it didn't know the answer) and was limited in time, since it had been trained on data only up to September 2021.

Over the past three years, as these tools have evolved, many of them now combine their training data with web search, and AI web searches are growing quickly. It can be much easier to search with natural language - asking a question in a complete sentence - and allows for easy voice searches on mobile apps, rather than typing a few keywords and scrolling through results that are often not pertinent.

Because of this, anyone creating content needs to rethink how they optimize that content so AI search tools can discover it.

The importance of a podcast website

Podcasts are generally served via an RSS feed, and video podcasts are often hosted on YouTube. It's essential to have a website for your podcast, regardless of how it's distributed. Fireside provides a website for all the podcasts it hosts, and you can add a custom domain to the site to personalize it. This website updates with each new episode and provides embedded podcast players, so anyone who discovers your podcast can listen to episodes without switching to a podcast app.

Each post on your podcast’s website contains show notes, and it's more important than ever to write comprehensive, structured show notes. You should have a detailed summary of each episode with headers, links, overviews of topics discussed, along with information about guests and sponsors.

Each episode should also contain a full, accurate transcription. While some podcast players, such as Apple Podcasts, generate automatic transcriptions, these are overridden if you upload your own text. You can use an AI tool to create the transcript, and it's important to edit it to ensure that names are spelled correctly, and that the topics you talk about don't contain errors so AI search tools can find them. It's also a good idea to insert headers in the transcript as topics change. Otter and other transcription tools use AI to automatically generate these headers.

Creating content for AI search tools

AI search tools work differently from standard search engines. They combine standard search indexes with an LLM analysis to provide answers. From Google's AI Overviews to Perplexity's more detailed responses, these answers can be several paragraphs long, and generally provide multiple sources, including various podcast directories.

While standard search engines just look for the words you've typed, AI search tools attempt to understand your query before searching. This means that keyword stuffing - putting many instances of keywords related to your site, product, or podcast - won't fool an AI search engine the way it could trick Google. This is why detailed show notes and transcripts are important.

AI search tools work well with structured content, where sections are clearly indicated with headers, and where topics are explained with bullet points. Well-written articles don't follow that structure, but a podcast summary and show notes are ideal for this type of presentation. Combined with a transcript broken down into sections with headers, this makes your episodes much more discoverable by for AI search tools.

Cross-linking content also reinforces it for AI search tools. You can link from new episodes to previous episodes mentioned in discussions, helping AI tools understand the web of interrelated content on your podcast's website.

And its important to have an About page for your podcast that clearly explains its purpose and topics, along with an FAQ page, both of which will also help AI search tools find the key elements of your podcast that people may search for.

Social media and podcasts

AI search tools don't just search standard websites; they also search social media. When I asked Perplexity about one of my podcasts, its sources include the podcast's website, Apple Podcast and Spotify, but also Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn. If you have social media accounts, it's important to maintain them and think of them as sources not just to interact with your audience, but also for AI search tools. Posting enhanced content to these social media services can help reinforce your podcast's discoverability when people search for its topics with AI tools.

Do an AI search tool audit

To see how AI search tools view your podcast, do an audit. Search for it with different AI search tools and see how they present it and which information they extract from your website and episode pages. You can optimize your content to improve what these tools process and see.

I searched for one of my podcasts in various AI search tools: Google, Bing, Perplexity, and Kagi. All of these search tools presented similar information with different levels of detail, and Perplexity presented the most information. Seeing how these tools present your podcast can help you decide whether you need to refine your About page and episode descriptions.

AI search tools are relatively new, but they are proving very popular with users. It's important to ensure that your podcast's website is correctly parsed so new listeners can discover your podcast when searching for a topic.