Every podcaster gets the cold emails. “We analyzed your show and found some opportunities.” Usually you skim it, roll your eyes, delete it. But a company called PodSEO has landed in our inbox multiple times now, and the numbers were strange enough that we had to share them.
What’s The Claims?
Here’s what PodSEO says it does for a show like ours:
- Tracks keyword rankings across Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music
- Tracks whether AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity recommend your show
- Finds websites and articles mentioning your podcast that you don’t know about
- Tracks similar shows and competitors
- Turns episodes into social video clips automatically
That’s a real list of real categories. Here’s what they actually sent us:
Our #1 ranked keywords on Apple Podcasts, per PodSEO: “jennifer garner new show” and “nonmainstream music.” We have never covered either topic. Not once, in 17 years.
Notice “geekcentric podcast” up there, listed as both a live #66 Spotify ranking and an “unclaimed” keyword we’re not appearing for. In the same email.
We pointed all of this out after the first email. The second one arrived with the same wrong keywords, unchanged.
Here’s the part worth saying out loud: we’d already built our own version of the one feature in that list we cared most about, tracking whether AI assistants recommend our shows, months before PodSEO’s first email ever showed up. Not because we saw them coming. Because it was an obvious thing to want to know, and we’re an indie network that builds its own tools instead of subscribing to someone else’s.
So when a pitch is built on “here’s data you can’t get yourself,” and the one data point you can actually check is wrong twice in a row, that’s worth knowing before you pay for the rest. We’re not telling anyone which SEO tool to use. We’re telling you that “nonmainstream music” ranking #1 for a comic-book-and-cartoon network speaks for itself.
