Here is a number that should reset how you think about earned media. When Google shows an AI summary, only eight percent of people click through to a website, down from 15 percent without one. How many click a source link (such as a podcast) inside the summary? One percent. Those figures come from Pew Research Center, which tracked nearly 68,879 real searches in 2025.
This changes which earned media assets still hold value. One of the most overlooked is also one of the strongest: podcast show notes. Most teams treat them as a chore. Used well, they teach an audience something real and leave a permanent citation for your spokesperson.
Being Cited is not the Same as Being Clicked
Read the Pew numbers again. Even sources the AI quotes rarely earn a click, so traffic is a poor way to judge a hit. Score it the way you already score earned media: reach, message pull-through and the right audience. Then add one test—whether your expert shows up in the answer itself. Search engines and language models cannot listen. They read. With no text on the page, an hour of insight stays invisible to the engines writing those answers.
Why Podcast Show Notes Outlast a Press Release
A press release announces an event, so it ages out as the news does. Podcast show notes explain a topic in a spokesperson’s own words, answering the questions people can keep asking for years. When an answer engine builds a response, it reaches for clear, sourced, question-shaped text. Good show notes are exactly that, which is why they keep surfacing.
Five Ways to Write Podcast Show Notes AI Will Quote
- Lead with the real question. "How do product recalls affect supplier contracts?" beats "Episode 47." Put a 40-to0-60 word answer right under it, then expand. Machines lift the short, direct answer first.
- Publish the full transcript, not a teaser. Apple made transcripts native in its app in 2024. Episodes with complete text surface for searches the audio alone never could.
- Name names. Cite the guest, the company, the figure, the date. Concrete detail reads like a source worth quoting. A vague recap reads like filler.
- Link episodes to each other. It takes minutes, and most shows skip it. Internal links tell search systems your content is a body of expertise, not a stray page.
- Write lines that stand alone. A machine lifts one sentence at a time, so make each key point clear without the question above it. A quote that needs context rarely gets used.
Turn one Interview Into a Permanent Citation
Get your spokesperson onto the right shows and the notes become a searchable record of that expertise, working for you with no media budget attached. To find the right shows, match a program’s real audience and subject to the spokesperson, then read its recent episodes before you pitch. Fit beats reach every time.
A single interview does not live in one spot. It is the audio, the notes page, the transcript, the social clips and a recap on your own site. Most teams ride the audio and clips, then leave the two that an answer engine reads—the notes page and the site post—sitting idle.
The click economy is not coming back. What replaces it rewards text that is structured, sourced and built to be quoted by a machine that never visits your site.
So sit with this. If an answer engine summarized your spokesperson’s expertise tomorrow, would it have anything written to pull from?
Anuj Agarwal is Founder of MillionPodcasts, a podcast database used by PR teams to research and find shows for media outreach.