What Are Show Notes and How Detailed Should They Be?
Show notes are the written companion to a podcast episode — published alongside the audio or video and typically accessible through your podcast host, your website, or the episode page in podcast apps.
The debate about how detailed show notes should be is one of the genuinely contested questions in podcasting, and the right answer depends on what role you want them to play.
What Show Notes Are For
Show notes serve multiple audiences and purposes:
For potential listeners: They communicate what an episode is about before someone commits to listening. A good show note is a pitch — it should make someone who sees it want to listen.
For listeners already engaged: They provide reference material — links mentioned in the episode, book recommendations, timestamps to specific topics, guest bio and social links.
For search engines: Show notes are crawlable text that can help your episode appear in Google search results. A well-written show note that includes relevant keywords and describes episode content accurately can drive meaningful organic discovery.
For accessibility: Transcripts and detailed show notes make content accessible to people who can't listen (hearing impaired users, people in situations where audio isn't possible).
How Detailed to Go
There's no universal answer, but here are the main approaches:
Minimal show notes: Episode title, a one-sentence description, guest name and link, maybe a timestamp list. Takes 10 minutes to produce. Does the minimum viable job for most purposes.
Medium-form show notes: A 2–4 paragraph description of the episode, key topics covered, guest information, links to everything mentioned. This is the most common approach for established shows and balances effort with usefulness.
Full show notes with transcript: Every word of the episode written out (often via AI transcription tools like Descript or Otter.ai), formatted and published. Maximum SEO value and accessibility. Time-intensive but increasingly automated.
The SEO Case for Detail
If organic Google traffic is part of your podcast growth strategy, longer, keyword-rich show notes make a significant difference. A show notes page with 800–1,500 words of genuinely useful content about the episode topic can rank for search terms that bring listeners to you who never would have found you through podcast directories alone.
Many successful podcasters effectively run a blog — where each blog post is the show notes for an episode. It's two content products from one recording.
