Google is alerting podcasters to expect a drop in clicks and impressions as it makes changes to Google Search. Starting February 13, the company says Google Search will stop showing podcast carousels. “As a result, clicks and impressions in ‘how people find your show’ will drop to zero after that date,” it says in a notice in the Google Podcast Manager. It also suggests that podcasters may want to consider downloading any historical data that they want to keep for future use before then.
As part of its effort to capture more podcast listening, Google Podcast Manager added search impressions and click data in October 2020 to help podcasters determine how well their show was performing in Google Search. It has also included the top discovered episodes and search terms that led to their podcast.
The loss of the data means podcasters will have less insight into how each episode is performing since the data allowed creators to see where listeners are tuning and where they were dropping out. It also offered data on how many were listening to a show on devices including smartphones, smart speakers, and desktops.
Google has not offered any explanation for the changes, but its podcast focus seems to be less on search than in the past. Instead, its most recent efforts have been mainly on leveraging the growth it has seen in podcast consumption on YouTube.
The Google Podcasts app debuted in June 2018 as part of the company’s quest to capture more of the listening that its search engines were cataloging. Google Podcasts crossed an important milestone with the app reaching 100 million installs in April 2021, but it has not offered any update on the app’s progress since then.While the vast majority of its downloads have been on Android devices, Google Podcast has not ignored the iPhone user. Google released the first version of Podcasts for iOS in March 2020 as part of an overhaul of the podcast app.
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