Last month I went looking for a number. I wanted to know whether the show notes we write as an add-on actually get read, so I asked a handful of hosts to check their own analytics and tell me what they saw. The answers were depressing and useful in equal measure. On most shows, the podcast app description gets scrolled by almost everyone. The website version of the same notes got a bit more traffic, but nearly all of it landed on one section and left. Nobody was reading the paragraph summary at the top. Almost nobody clicked the guest bio.
So here is my position, and it is not the popular one: most show notes are written for an imaginary reader who does not exist, and the fix is not to write better prose, it is to stop writing prose at all.
I still sell show notes and chapters as a $35 add-on. I am not about to argue myself out of a line item. But I would rather sell a thing that works than a thing that ticks a box, and after two years of watching what hosts actually get out of them, I think the standard format is mostly ceremony.
What people actually do with the description field
Watch someone use a podcast app. Really watch, do not imagine it. They tap play from a feed. If they open the episode page at all, it is for one of three reasons: they want to know how long it is, they want to know who the guest is, or they are hunting for a specific link the host mentioned out loud.
That is the whole list. Length, guest, link.
Nobody opens the description to read a 120 word summary of the conversation they are about to have. If they were unsure whether to press play, the thing that decided it was the title and the artwork, which is why I spend more time arguing about titles than about notes. I wrote a whole piece on how episode titles get built because that field does the work that people wish the description did.
The summary paragraph exists because blogging conventions leaked into podcasting around 2016 and nobody audited them since. It is there because it has always been there.
The three things worth keeping
When I strip a set of notes down to what earns its space, I end up with the same three blocks nearly every time.
- Chapters with honest labels. Not "Intro" and "Main topic". Actual labels that name what happens, so someone scrubbing can find the bit their friend told them about.
- The links said out loud. If a host says "I will put it in the show notes", that promise is now a debt. Pay it in the first two lines, not the last.
- A one line "who is this" for the guest. Name, what they do, where to find them. One line. Not a bio scraped from a speaker page.
Everything else is optional and most of it is filler. Timestamps for every topic shift, keyword paragraphs, a transcript dumped in raw, a list of "topics discussed" that reads like a table of contents for a textbook. I have written all of those. I do not think any of them changed a download number.
Show notes are not an article about the episode. They are a control panel for it. Buttons, not paragraphs.
That reframe changed how I build them. A control panel gets judged on whether the buttons work, not on whether the copy is charming.
Chapters are the only part with a real job
Chapters are the exception that proves the rest of the point. They are structural, not decorative. They show up in the scrub bar in most apps, they show up as segments on YouTube, and they let a listener jump.
They are also the part most often done badly, because whoever writes them is usually working from a transcript rather than from the cut. A chapter marker written from a transcript lands on the sentence where the topic is first mentioned. A chapter marker written from the cut lands on the beat where the topic actually starts, which is usually a few seconds later, after the transition breath.
This is why our editors do chapters from the timeline. Our people watch the whole episode anyway, since nothing here gets auto-cut by silence detection, so the chapter points come from someone who knows where the seams are. It is the same reason I keep banging on about the unglamorous work that makes shows good. Chapters are exactly that kind of work. Invisible when right, annoying when wrong.
A quick rule I use: if a chapter label could be swapped between two different episodes without anyone noticing, it is not a label, it is a placeholder.
The website version is a different product
Here is where I will contradict myself slightly. The notes in the podcast app are close to worthless. The notes on your own site are not.
They are not worthless because they are not being read by listeners. They are being read by search engines, by language models pulling summaries, and by the one person who is deciding whether to pitch you as a guest. That is a completely different audience with completely different needs, and the mistake is writing one artefact and pasting it into both places.
For the app, I want the control panel. Short, functional, links up top.
For the site, I want something closer to a real page: the full transcript, a proper heading structure, the pull quotes worth quoting. That version can be long, because length is not costing anyone anything there. Nobody is scrolling past it on a phone while holding a coffee.
The practical version of this is that you write the notes once, then cut them down for the feed rather than padding them up for the site. Cutting down is easier and produces better copy. Padding up produces the summary paragraph nobody reads.
What to do with the time you save
If you stop writing 300 words of description per episode, you get maybe forty minutes back a week. I would put that into two places.
First, into the audio itself. A show that leaves its breathing room intact and lets a good answer land is worth more than any amount of metadata, which is roughly the argument in the case for leaving pauses in. Notes cannot rescue a cut that rushes.
Second, into packaging. The title, the artwork, the thumbnail if the episode goes to YouTube. That is where the marginal listener is won or lost. Our sister studio ClickTheory does thumbnails at 8 for $250, and honestly, one good thumbnail moves more numbers in a week than a year of tidy descriptions. That is not a fun thing to admit when you sell writing as an add-on, but it is true.
Format matters here too. A tightly produced narrative episode needs different notes than a loose two hour conversation. Narrative shows need chapters less and links more. Conversations are the opposite, and the longer they run the more the chapter list carries the whole thing.
The one case where full notes really do pay
I want to be fair to the other side, because there is a case.
If your show is a discovery engine for your business, meaning people find you by searching a topic and land on an episode, then the site page needs to be a proper page. Full transcript, headings, internal links to your own services. In that setup the notes are a landing page wearing a podcast costume, and treating them as an afterthought is a real mistake.
The tell is simple. Open your analytics. If organic search is sending meaningful traffic to episode pages, write the long version and keep writing it. If it is not, and for most shows it is not, you are doing homework for a teacher who never collects it.
Same logic applies when a show changes its name or its focus and the archive stops matching the new positioning. That is a bigger job than notes, and I have written about when to rename your show separately, but a rename is one of the few moments where going back and rewriting old descriptions genuinely earns its keep.
How we handle it
Our show notes and chapters add-on is $35 an episode, and what you get is deliberately not a wall of text. Chapters cut from the timeline, the links that were promised on air, a short guest line, and a set of pull quotes you can drop into a caption. If you want the long site version too, we build it from the same pass.
The base editing is separate. Starter is $199 an episode for a single camera at 1080p with one revision, Studio is $299 for two to four cameras at 4K with unlimited revisions, both up to 60 minutes. First cut lands in 48 hours and revisions come back the next working day. If you want the full breakdown of packs and add-ons it is all on the pricing page, and if you are weighing what you actually need, cheap podcast editing versus premium is the honest version of that comparison rather than the sales version.
I am in Dubai and the studio works remote, so most of this happens over a shared folder and a short note. Which is fitting, given the subject.
The short version
Write less in the feed. Write more on your site, but only if your analytics say anyone gets there. Put the promised links at the top where a person hunting for them will actually find them. Cut chapters from the edit, not from a transcript. And spend the reclaimed hour on the title and the artwork, because those are the fields that decide whether anyone presses play at all.
If you have been dutifully writing summaries nobody opens, you have my permission to stop. Nobody will notice, which is rather the point. If you want a second opinion on your own numbers before you change anything, send me a link and I will take a look.