Podspun is a podcast website builder currently pitching itself to press outlets like PodNews, with a free “Discoverability Report” tool as the hook. Run your show through it, and it scores your site, flags gaps, and pitches its hosted platform as the fix.
We ran two of our shows through it: All Things Transformers and Altered Geek. Both live on thegcrn.com. Both run through the exact same WordPress plugin, the exact same episode template, the exact same code that powers everything on the site. Here’s what came back.
All Things Transformers, structured data:
⚠ Some structured data exists, but nothing that tells Google this is a podcast.
Altered Geek, structured data:
✓ Podcast markup found.
Same plugin. Same template file. Same schema block, generated the same way for every episode on the network. One audit calls it missing. The other calls it present. We checked the source: there’s a single function that outputs PodcastEpisode and PodcastSeries JSON-LD schema for every episode page on the site, with no per-show branching. There’s no version of our code where one show has this markup and the other doesn’t. Podspun’s tool contradicted itself against identical code.
Then there’s the transcript claim. Both audits carry the same line, verbatim:
No transcript link found on your homepage, so the words in your episodes are likely invisible to search.
Both episodes they used as demo material have full transcripts, live and working, tabbed right next to the episode player. Not buried, not paywalled, one click away. The claim is checking for a transcript link on the homepage, which was never going to be there, and reporting that as if it means the words aren’t searchable at all.
We don’t think this is malicious. It reads like a shallow crawl: check a couple of surface signals, template out a report, sell the gap. But when the two things a discoverability tool is supposed to discover, structured data and transcripts, both come back wrong on the two episodes it chose to showcase, that’s not a nitpick. That’s the product not doing the one job it’s for.
To be clear about what we’re not saying: a hosted platform with your own domain, transcript search, and clip tools is a legitimate product for someone who doesn’t want to run their own infrastructure. That’s a fair pitch. What isn’t fair is an audit tool telling podcasters their content is invisible to search when it demonstrably isn’t, especially when the same tool can’t even agree with itself on the same underlying code.
We build and maintain our own plugin stack for exactly this reason: nobody else gets to be the source of truth about what our site does or doesn’t have. If you’re a podcaster getting one of these reports in your inbox, it’s worth checking their claims against your actual site before you take the score at face value.
