Originally published in June 2021, last updated in July 2026
Five years ago, I had two clients who produce podcasts — one podcast about building tiny houses and another about mindset for business owners — ask me how to integrate the podcast (specifically, the show notes) into their SEO strategy. They’d both listened to Neil Patel’s interview on Amy Porterfield’s Online Marketing Made Easy podcast, during which Neil tells Amy that her podcast show notes are pretty much useless for her podcast SEO, and just like Amy, they both started to panic.
“What should I do to make my show notes more SEO-friendly? Should I turn them into blog posts? Include the audio at the end of a related post?”
My 2021 answer (which shocked both of them): Don’t try to optimize your podcast show notes for SEO, because the goal of show notes is to serve your listeners, not to be found by new people.
And I still stand by that — your show notes should primarily be a resource for your listeners as their primary audience.
But also? A lot has changed in marketing in the past five years (that’s an understatement), and the secondary benefit of having really robust show notes is one of them.
Show notes are first and foremost a resource guide for your existing listeners. Writing them well also happens to explain your show to AI.
The primary audience is your listeners, but the secondary benefit is still real: Written show notes gets crawled by search engines and AI systems trying to understand your body of work.
This doesn’t mean you should adopt those old school SEO practices of shoving keywords into every nook and cranny (blech), though keywords do still matter for podcast episode titles, because Apple Podcasts still uses keyword-matching in its algorithm.
Content written to serve a real reader reads as substantive to everything else that encounters it. Content written to game a system reads as thin to everyone, including the system.
So What Should Go In Your Show Notes to Benefit Your Listeners And AI Understanding?
You need to explain what’s in the episode. The same thoroughness that makes show notes useful to a listener is exactly what a crawler needs to understand what your show is about, who was on it, and what you actually believe.
So what belongs in a good set of show notes now:
- What listeners can expect from this episode: not “we talk about marketing,” but the actual specific things covered, in enough detail that someone skimming could tell you what the episode argues.
- Links to anything you mention: books, tools, other episodes, the study you cited, all of it. If you said it out loud, it should be a link in the notes.
- Include a transcript
- Guest bios: not just a name and a title, but who they are and why they were the right person for this conversation. This is doing double duty: your listeners get context, and you’re building the kind of consistent, specific description of a person that reinforces who they are everywhere they show up (the same logic behind Brand Entities in the BEACON Framework — the more specifically and consistently someone gets described, the more confidently a system can say “yes, this is a real person who does this thing”).
Don’t scrimp on the explanations. Thin show notes don’t help your listeners trying to find the timestamp they wanted, and they don’t help a crawler trying to figure out if your show is worth citing.
And if you want to make your show notes do even more work for you (without a ton of extra time and resources), check out the Podcast AI Visibility Ladder.
Show notes are the second rung. You can see the whole climb from raw audio, up through show notes, to podcast transcript, to an actual written blog post an AI system can cite with confidence. And if your show is audio-only, putting it on YouTube is worth doing alongside strong show notes — it’s a different platform for the same body of work, not a substitute for writing good notes in the first place.
