What a search engine sees on an app, and on your own page
Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Twitch pages get indexed. Searching a show's name often brings them up. The difference is what's written on them and where they send people.
An app's page for an episode carries the title and the description you gave the app, at the app's address, with a button into the app. Everything said in the episode is audio, and a search engine can't match words that were only spoken. A page of your own carries the full description, the chapters and, on Pro, the whole transcript as text. It sits at your address, and a visitor who lands on it stays with your other uploads.
What's on every ShowHub page
These are on every plan, for every kind of upload:
- Its own address. One upload, one page, listed in your site's sitemap. Your site's robots file points crawlers to that sitemap and doesn't block any of them.
- Text in the page as it loads. Pages are rendered on the server, so the words are in the page before any script runs. Where your design is drawn in the browser, the server version stays underneath for crawlers and for anything that doesn't run JavaScript.
- A title and description. The page title is the upload's title and your show's name. The description comes from your feed or channel.
- Structured data. A block that tells search engines what the page is: the upload, the show it belongs to and when it came out, plus the video when there is one. Google uses it to understand the page; it doesn't promise any special look in results.
- Sharing previews. The title, description and artwork that show when someone posts the link.
- A canonical address. If you use your own domain, every page says that's its real address, and the showhubco.com address forwards to it.
If you make a podcast
The episode plays from the audio file your host already sends to every app, so plays still reach your host's stats. The page carries the full show notes, not the two lines an app shows before "more". Timestamps in your notes become chapters.
The biggest addition is the transcript. On Pro, every word of an episode is written out on its page, with time codes where there are any. On Business, transcripts are made for every page automatically. A search for something said 30 minutes into an episode can then match that page.
If you make music
Each track gets a page that plays it from your SoundCloud feed, so plays still count on SoundCloud. Search engines read the words on the page, so the notes and credits you write for a track are what they have to go on. Put the story behind the song, the credits and the lyrics in the description. Add links to Spotify, Apple Music and wherever else you are, so someone who finds the page can listen where they like.
If you post videos
YouTube videos play in YouTube's own player on the page, and YouTube counts a play there as a view. The page carries the video's full description, and timestamps in it become chapters a visitor can jump to. On Pro, a transcript can go on the page too. TikTok videos get their own page with their cover, length and notes, so a short that has dropped out of the feed is still a page a search can land on.
If you stream
Past broadcasts, highlights and clips from Twitch or Kick get pages of their own, with their title, notes and chapters. Twitch videos play in Twitch's own player on the page; Kick replays open on Kick. A stream that was only live once becomes a page that can be found afterwards.
There's one limit: Twitch deletes past broadcasts after a set time. When a broadcast is gone from Twitch, ShowHub hides its page so nobody lands on a player with nothing in it. Highlights and uploads don't expire, so save the moments you want to keep as highlights. On Kick, a page is hidden when you delete the broadcast.
How AI assistants come into it
AI assistants that search the web answer from pages they can read, and many show the pages they used as sources. Google says its AI features need nothing extra: a page that is indexed and eligible to show with a snippet can be used, and no special files or markup are needed. ChatGPT's search uses its own crawler and asks sites to allow it in their robots file; ShowHub sites allow every crawler.
So the same things help with both: a page per upload, at an address you keep, with the words written out.
What nobody can promise
- Rankings and traffic. Search engines decide what to show. A good page is the part you control.
- Timing. Google says crawling can take from a few days to a few weeks, and a crawl doesn't guarantee a place in results.
- AI citations. An assistant decides which sources to show for each answer.
- Pages with little on them. An upload with a one-line description and no transcript gives a search engine one line to read. That's the case for transcripts and for real descriptions.
Seeing how your pages do
On Business you can connect Google Search Console. ShowHub then shows, for each page, the searches that led people to it, a couple of days behind, as Google's own data is.
To see where a podcast stands today, run the free site check. It reads your feed, finds your website and its sitemap, matches each episode to a page and checks how many of those pages Google has picked up.