How to Make Your Podcast Searchable in the Age of AI and AEO
AI and Me
I have a love/hate relationship with AI.
On the “love” side, I’ve found AI tools to be very helpful. For example, I have a well-documented problem writing emails with a terrible tone. When I think I’m being brief, recipients think I sound angry. When I try to sound professional, others think I sound rude.
In the past, I’d make a colleague or my wife stop what they were doing to review my emails. These days, ChatGPT rewrites my emails to sound friendly, professional, or whatever tone I’m going for. This has saved me from numerous uncomfortable misunderstandings, and for that I am grateful. I’m sure my correspondents agree.
AI can be quite useful as a business tool. At Voxtopica, we use AI to help write transcripts and identify key points in lengthy interviews—both essential steps in making our podcast content more searchable online. This saves a lot of time and helps keep our costs down for our clients.
However, we never ask AI to create content for us; we only use it to improve our content, such as drafting SEO-friendly podcast show notes from a transcript or a blog post from a detailed outline (I wrote this entire article, then had ChatGPT condense and simplify it because I struggle with verbosity).
On the “hate” side, I cannot abide the constant insertion of AI into every application and service I use. I can’t open a web browser, word processor, spreadsheet, search engine, email application, or any other digital tool I use without being pushed to let AI do whatever I need for me. It’s extremely annoying and wasteful.
AI and Your Content
One of my least favorite intrusions of AI is forced upon me by Google. For me, the search engine’s AI Overview completely destroys Google’s value. I use a search engine to find resources I’m looking for, not read what a robot that is probably hallucinating thinks I want to know. (Recently, author Dave Barry was surprised to learn that, according to Google AI Overview, he was dead.)
While I could simply raise my fist and shout, in full “old man yells at sky” mode, I have a job to do. And that job includes helping you make a successful podcast—and that means making your podcast findable in search. So I have to deal with Google AI Overview, and (if you have a podcast) so do you.
I credit Steven Goldstein at Amplifi Media for first bringing this to my attention. He has a great post explaining how Search Engine Optimization (SEO), once the core of a digital content marketer’s world, is collapsing and being replaced by Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
The thesis is that Google and other search engines, as well as a lot of other software products and services, don’t want to guide users to content—they want to replace content. In other words, when users type in search terms, Google wants to stop them from clicking on a link, accepting the AI Overview’s information and moving on. And the data says this is exactly what’s happening.
So, what’s a podcaster to do? You need to structure your podcast content to be easily accessible and digestible by AI if you want it to remain discoverable.
AI and Podcasts
For the best AEO, content should be:
Quotable
Summarisable
Structurally readable (by AI)
For podcasts, that content resides in your episode transcripts.
Podcasters often want to fill their show notes with all the podcast SEO tactics. That’s fine, but show notes are really for potential listeners, and some podcast players will penalize a podcast with show notes stuffed full of keywords.
Google’s crawler bots can read transcripts, and since they are the bulk of the text content associated with an episode, they carry more weight than show notes when it comes to search rankings.
Your Transcript is Critical
First of all, publish a transcript with your podcast episodes. If you aren’t doing that, you’re doing podcasting wrong.
There are plenty of reasons to publish a transcript, but AEO requires it. Think of your transcript as your podcast’s storefront window.
It needs to be readable. Clean. Segmented. Easy to scan. Speaker labels, section headers, and key takeaways—these help AI understand what your episode is about. Without it, your brilliant conversation might as well not exist in search results.
Machines don’t listen (yet). They read. So give them something worth reading if you want to make your podcast discoverable.
How to Structure Your Podcast for AEO
Open your episodes with a bold idea, a key question, or a takeaway. AI rewards clarity and structure, so don’t meander.
Format transcripts like editorial content. Make them readable for humans and parseable by machines.
Add a “key takeaways” section, a short summary, and an FAQ (when appropriate). These elements help both people and AI know exactly what your episode delivers.
If your show includes video, use chapters to segment the content and release clips with subtitles. Go beyond publishing—think about distribution across as many channels as possible.
Use clear, specific episode titles and accurate show notes, with structured data that makes your podcast searchable.
Discovery Isn’t Passive Anymore
What we’re seeing isn’t the end of discoverability. It’s the end of passive discoverability.
Podcasters who build with intent, structure for clarity, and think machine-first will thrive. If you want your show to be found, you need to optimize for how AI and search engines work today—not how they worked five years ago.
And if you’re thinking about how to apply this to your own show, let’s talk. We’ve been rethinking discovery strategies for the new era, helping clients stay visible while others fade into the background.