Research

Your podcast’s numbers live in four or five places. Spotify for Creators has your plays and how people find you. Apple Podcasts Connect has listeners, followers and how long people stay. YouTube Studio has views and the searches behind them. Your host has downloads. None of them tells you whether the keyword you started ranking for last month actually brought anyone in. Starting today, PodSEO brings them together. Connect your accounts once and every number sits next to your rankings, synced every day. It’s free on every plan. ...

Type “Michael Jackson” into any music app and three layers of identity light up at once: the artist (Michael Jackson), the album (Thriller), the track (Beat It). All three are iconic. All three sing. Apple Podcasts spun out of iTunes. Spotify launched as a music app and bolted podcasts on later. Their podcast search engines still carry that DNA. They’re built to navigate a world of artists, albums, and tracks. ...

You’ve been told to share your Spotify link everywhere. Put it in your Instagram bio. Add it to your email signature. Make it easy for people to listen. But is that what actually works for getting press coverage? We analyzed 655,000 editorial podcast placements across 29,000+ domains to find out what journalists, bloggers, and high-authority publications actually link to when they mention podcasts. The results might change how you think about podcast promotion. ...

What if we told you there’s a simple podcast optimization that correlates with 6.7x better keyword rankings on Apple Podcasts, yet 91% of podcasters completely ignore it? After analyzing 332,528 active English podcasts, we discovered that strategic tagline usage in podcast titles and author fields is one of the most underutilized SEO opportunities. The results? Pretty surprising. And it’s dead simple to implement. The Discovery: Taglines Correlate with Dramatic Ranking Improvements Our analysis examined how podcasts perform in keyword rankings based on their use of taglines: descriptive text separated by dashes ( - ), pipes ( | ), or semicolons ( ; ) in their title or author fields. ...

Imagine you wanted to find a new podcast to listen to. The most likely move in 2026 is to ask your AI assistant something like “What’s a good true crime podcast?” or “Best business podcasts for entrepreneurs?” or “Podcasts about mindfulness?” But what do these AIs recommend? Over 4 weeks, we systematically queried four major AI assistants — ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Perplexity, and Gemini (Google) — across 849 different podcast topics to create the first comprehensive map of AI podcast discovery. ...