Google Brings Podcasts to Search Results

Google is soon going to give podcasts more prominence in search results. So far, when you searched for podcasts about a certain topic or a podcast, Google would simply show podcasts on third-party services like Stitcher, or iTunes. That’s changing now.

Google will start surfacing podcasting right on search results. That means when you search something like “podcasts about Microsoft”, it will simply show you a number of episodes/podcasts that talk about Microsoft. From there, you can start playing the episode right from search.

The same feature will be making its way to Google Podcasts on the web and Google Assistant.

Assistant will allow you to play you podcasts by simply asking for things like “play a podcast about Windows” and it will suggest relevant episodes. Podcast publishers will also be able to choose if they want their podcasts to play on a third-party platform in the future, which will be useful for podcasts that are exclusive to a certain platform. Google says the feature will also eliminate the need to use the term “podcast” in some cases and simply surface podcast results along with other things like tweets, videos, images, and other regular results.