RELATED ARTICLE

Podcast episodes will now show up in Google searches. Helpful discovery mechanism or a shot in the Platform Wars?

Nicholas Quah

May 14, 2019

Google is surfacing podcast episodes in Search based on what’s talked about in the show, as well as its title and description. The links take you to Google Podcasts, of course (for now). This works for English content and United States searches.

“We’ll soon add the ability for publishers to specify a playback destination, such as a third-party website or app. This means people can discover podcasts that may be exclusively available by purchase or subscription on third-party podcast providers,” according to the release.

Quah broke down the potentials of Google stepping into the podcast platform war, so it’s interesting that podcasters will be able to choose to not have the Google Podcasts’ link show up. From May:

For what it’s worth, I’m still hesitant to invoke the “platform war” framework at this juncture, and that’s mostly because I think the Apple-Podcasts-link-appending business feels possibly unintentional on Google’s part; my sense is that the in-search Google Podcasts feature generally seeks to attach itself to the most relevant response, and it happens to be the case that Apple Podcast listings tend to be the most relevant response to podcast-related queries. For this to be a “podcast platform war,” I think, there should be overt intentionality. Then again…I don’t fault doomsday preppers for building underground shelters.

Anyway, the introduction of this feature also yields other potential complexities, mostly associated with the everyday doldrums of SEO management. In particular, this is probably going to change how people think about naming their shows, as they now operate within a universe that contains a powerful search engine with robust rules.