SEO has twenty years of folklore behind it. PSO has an acronym and not much else — which is why most podcasters either ignore podcast search entirely or expect it to do something it can't.
PSO stands for podcast search optimization: the work of making your show appear when someone types a term into the search box inside a podcast app. The name comes from the hosting tools that built dashboards around it — Ausha calls theirs a PSO Control Panel — and the practice spread from there.
It's worth doing. It's also worth knowing exactly how small the surface is, because that determines where you spend your time.
PSO is not SEO
The two share a vocabulary and almost nothing else.
| SEO (the web) | PSO (podcast apps) | |
|---|---|---|
| What gets searched | The open web | A closed index inside one app |
| What ranks | Pages | Shows, mostly — episodes sometimes |
| Signals you control | Content, links, structure | Metadata, popularity, engagement |
| Who you're up against | Anyone with a website | The other shows in your niche |
The good news is in that last row. You aren't competing with the whole internet — you're competing with the other shows in your category, and there are far fewer of them. Terms that would be hopeless on Google are genuinely winnable in Apple Podcasts.
The bad news is the row above it. On the web you can win by writing better. In a podcast app, most of what decides your rank isn't in your writing at all.
What keyword tracking actually measures
When you track a keyword, you're recording your show's rank in Apple Podcasts search — position 1 is the top result — and checking it on a schedule. Over time that builds a rank history, and the history is where the signal lives.
A single rank is a snapshot. The movement is the story. Two things about rank that surprise people:
- It's a position, not a quantity. Climbing from 40th to 12th is a real win that produces no change in any other number on your dashboard.
- History starts when you track. No tool can show you where you ranked before you started watching. Add a handful of keywords on day one rather than adding them one at a time later and waiting months for a trend.
What apps actually index
This is the part most PSO advice skips. In 2021, Podnews ran an experiment: they stuffed nonsense words into different RSS tags on two feeds, then checked which of 14 podcast apps surfaced them. The findings were bracing.
| tag | indexed by |
|---|---|
| Show title | Every app tested |
| Show description | Castbox, Listen Notes, Player FM, PodcastAddict, Spotify — not Apple, Amazon Music, or Pocket Casts |
itunes:author |
Almost every app tested |
| Episode title | Most apps — but not Podcast Index, Pocket Casts, or Overcast |
| Episode description | Google Podcasts and GoodPods only |
Show notes (content:encoded) |
Google Podcasts, iVoox, Stitcher, Listen Notes only |
podcast:person |
Nobody. Not one app, including Podcast Index itself |
copyright |
Nobody |
Two of the apps in that study no longer exist — Google Podcasts shut down in 2024, Stitcher in 2023 — so read the table as a shape rather than a current map. The shape has held: apps index a thin slice of your metadata, and they weight show-level fields far more heavily than episode-level ones.
The median podcast app is not a search engine. It's a directory with a text box, and it mostly knows your show's name.
What Apple says today
Apple publishes its own answer, and it's more current than any third-party test. Apple's guidance lists three ranking factors: metadata (show name, channel name, episode title), popularity (followers and plays), and user behavior (engagement). It also states plainly that ratings, reviews, and shares are not factored into search results.
Notice what's missing. There's no slot for a keyword field, no way to bid, and no equivalent of a backlink. Two of the three factors — popularity and engagement — are consequences of making a show people want, not things you can type into a form.
Since March 2024 Apple has also generated searchable transcripts for every episode, which it says help people find and search within episodes. That's the one genuinely new surface in years, and it rewards the thing you were going to do anyway: talk about your actual topic, in words, on the recording.
What this means for what you write
Your show name and episode titles do nearly all the work. They're the fields every app indexes, and the ones Apple names first. Put the searchable thing in the title — a guest's name, the topic, the question the episode answers — rather than a clever phrase that only makes sense once you've heard it.
Show notes and descriptions are a web play, not an app play. Only a couple of apps index them, and a 2021 Buzzsprout figure cited by Podnews found that under 5% of listeners use an app that searches episode descriptions at all. Write them properly anyway — for the humans who land on your site, and for Google, which does read them.
Don't stuff keywords. It breaches Apple's guidelines, it doesn't build trust, and given how few fields are indexed there's barely anywhere to stuff them. The upside is tiny and the downside is a directory that thinks you're spam.
Picking keywords you can actually win
A keyword list worth tracking has three parts:
- The obvious ones — your show's name, your own name, your main topic. These are your baseline; you should rank first for your own name, and if you don't, something is wrong.
- What you want to rank for — the search a new listener would type to find a show like yours. This is the aspirational set.
- Your competitors' territory — terms where a comparable show ranks well and you'd like to displace them. A rival ranking there is proof the term is winnable.
That last point is the winnability test, and it's the most useful habit in PSO. Before you spend a quarter chasing a term, look at who ranks above you. If they're your size, a few well-timed episodes on the topic can move you. If they have ten times your reviews, the term is a wall — find a more specific one instead.
Near-variants beat head terms almost every time. "Podcast analytics for indie shows" is contestable; "podcast analytics" is not.
Reading the trend
Three shapes, three different responses:
- A steady climb — whatever you're doing is working. Keep doing it.
- A sudden drop — something changed. A new show entered the space, your release cadence lapsed, or Apple's ranking shifted. Cross-reference the date against your release schedule before you panic.
- Flat and stuck — the term may simply be too competitive. Check the competitors list before spending more effort on it.
The honest expectation
PSO is a long-tail, compounding channel. It will not multiply your audience. What it does is stop you leaking the people who already want you — the listener who heard your show mentioned on another podcast, half-remembered the name, and typed it in.
That's a smaller promise than SEO's, and it's the true one. Make your show findable by name, put the topic in the title, and let popularity and engagement do the rest.
PodAnalyst tracks your rank in Apple Podcasts search for the terms you choose, checks it on a schedule, and shows you the movement — plus who else ranks for each term. Keywords covers the basics; Keyword detail shows one term's full history and its competitors. Keyword tracking is included on every plan, including the free one.
If you want to see where you rank today, start free — type in a term and we'll tell you.