Reference · Airtime Check
The Glossary
Every term Airtime Check leans on, in plain language, plus why it actually matters for getting your show found — not just what it means.
- SEOSearch Engine Optimization
- Shaping a webpage so it ranks well in traditional search results, like Google.
- AEOAnswer Engine Optimization
- Shaping your presence online so AI chat tools name you in their answers, the way SEO shapes a page to rank.
- RSS feed
- The file behind every podcast that lists each episode's title, description, and audio location. Every app and directory reads it to build your show's listing.
- Show notes
- The text describing one specific episode — not the whole show, just that episode.
- Transcript
- A full text version of what's actually said in an episode.
- Directory
- A platform people browse or search to find podcasts — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podchaser, Listen Notes.
- PADPodcast App Discovery — this page's term
- The recommendation and search surfaces built into a podcast app itself — Apple's charts and category pages, Spotify's algorithmic "you might also like" rows, in-app search results.
- Roundup
- A "best of" or "X podcasts to try" article from a blog, magazine, or newsletter.
- Doorwaythis page's term
- A specific place your show could be listed, mentioned, or featured that it currently isn't.
- Backlink
- A link from another website pointing to yours.
- Domain strengthdomain authority / domain rating
- A third-party score estimating how much link-based trust a website has built up.
- Structured dataschema markup
- Hidden code on a webpage that labels what something is — "this is a podcast episode, here's its title and date" — so machines don't have to guess.
- E-E-A-TExperience, Expertise, Authority, Trust
- Google's own framework for what makes a source worth surfacing.
- Entity
- A specific, consistently identified "thing" — a show, a person, a business — that search engines and AI can recognize across the web.
- Freshness
- How recently a piece of content was published or updated.
- Share of voice
- Roughly, how often you show up relative to competitors across a set of research questions, rather than one single yes/no.
- Incognito / temporary / private chat
- A chat session an AI has no memory of.
Why it matters: AEO builds on top of SEO fundamentals. Most of what helps a page rank also helps an AI find and trust it.
Why it matters: it's the reason this check exists. Ranking well in Google doesn't automatically mean an AI cites you.
Why it matters: it's one of the only pieces of text about your show guaranteed to exist everywhere it's listed. Get it right once, it pays off in every directory at the same time.
Why it matters: it's the single biggest piece of crawlable, quotable text about that episode. Vague notes give both Google and an AI nothing to work with.
Why it matters: audio isn't searchable text. A transcript is what turns your spoken content into something an AI can retrieve, quote, and cite back to a listener.
Why it matters: directories are usually the richest, most-trusted source an AI's research turns to first.
Why it matters: it runs on a different signal than this check — in-app listens, completion rate, and subscriber growth inside that one platform, not mentions across the open web. Doing well here doesn't guarantee an AI chat names you, and doing well in AI answers doesn't guarantee an app's own algorithm favors you.
Why it matters: it's exactly the kind of page an AI reads when researching "best [genre] podcast" — someone already did the recommendation work.
Why it matters: every doorway you open is one more path an AI's research can wander down and actually find you.
Why it matters: still the main signal, for Google and indirectly for AI research, that other sources vouch for you.
Why it matters: a stronger domain makes it easier for your own show's website to rank, on top of anything a directory does for you.
Why it matters: reasonable technical hygiene worth doing. I don't have a confirmed, current read on exactly how each AI engine weighs podcast-specific schema, so treat it as good practice, not a guaranteed lever.
Why it matters: the same qualities that earn Google's trust are a reasonable proxy for what earns an AI chat tool's trust, even without confirmation of the exact mechanism.
Why it matters: spell your show's name identically everywhere. Inconsistent naming fragments your identity instead of reinforcing it across the sources an AI cross-references.
Why it matters: an AI doing live research for "best of [this year]" tends to lean toward newer information. A stale show-notes page works against you even if the episode itself holds up.
Why it matters: the goal isn't one lucky mention, it's showing up consistently — this check's whole six-question, multi-engine design exists to measure that instead of a single roll of the dice.
Why it matters: it's the entire reason this check's score means anything. A chat that remembers you might name your show as a courtesy, not because its research actually found you.