On September 17 and 18, Podcast Movement made its first appearance in New York City. The event, which is the world’s largest and longest-running gathering of podcasters for over a decade, traded its usual conference hotel ballrooms for Terminal 5, a Hell’s Kitchen venue better known for hosting concerts than keynotes. This shift in scenery set the tone for two days that felt less like a typical podcast conference and more like a pivotal moment of self-reflection that the podcast industry is having about what it wants to become.
The sessions we attended shared a feeling that was equal parts self-awareness and protectiveness. Creators and executives alike talked openly about what counts as a podcast, who gets to decide that, and why the medium’s openness is worth defending. It was also hard not to notice who wasn’t there: no booths from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, three platforms that increasingly decide how podcasts are discovered and consumed.
Here’s what stood out to us from this year’s Podcast Movement. If you missed out on the event, check out our list of best podcast events and conferences to see what’s coming up next. And if you’re trying to improve your show’s discoverability and get it in front of the right sponsors, check out our podcast growth services. Subscribe to our newsletter for ongoing insights on what’s new and trending in podcasting from the people shaping the industry’s future.
TAKEAWAY #1: Podcast SEO now means writing for AI tools
Bruce Chamoff, founder of the World Podcast Network, made the case that podcast SEO has split into two distinct methods: optimizing for Google, and optimizing for the AI tools many are using for search purposes. His advice for the former was blunt: keep episode titles under seven words, since listeners have short attention spans, and remember that Google’s search engine results only display about 55 characters before truncating a title. The AI side of his talk, however, was the more interesting draw.
Chamoff pointed to something we’ve observed when testing how AI tools represent the podcast industry: Reddit is the single most cited website across both AI and Google search results. That means a podcast discussed in the right sub-reddit has a real shot of surfacing inside of an AI tool’s generated answer. He also floated another idea worth considering: treat a podcast episode itself as a search prompt, built around the exact question a listener or an AI tool would type in.
He also shared a tactical checklist that turns this idea into a repeatable process. Add a “related episodes” section to every show notes page, and link to the podcast’s next and previous episodes. This keeps listeners and crawlers moving through a show’s archive. If budgeting for transcripts is an obstacle, Chamoff recommended Speechify and Otter.ai’s free tiers as cost-effective tools to get the job done. Check out our article about strong titles and full transcripts for more information on how to make these the building blocks of your podcast’s discoverability.
TAKEAWAY #2: Podcasting’s origin story is also an argument for keeping it open
James Cridland’s session served as both a personal retrospective and a campaign speech, walking through his own career alongside the history of podcasting. According to Cridland, the first real podcast was Christopher Lydon’s recorded July 2003 interviews distributed through his long-running platform Radio Open Source. He also traced the origin of the word itself: “podcast” first appeared in print in The Guardian in 2006, which called it a “made-up word” at the time. Cridland joked that actor and comedian Robin Williams could just as easily be credited as an early podcasting pioneer, since he invested in Audible back in 1999.
The walk down memory lane, however, was less about nostalgia and more of a warning. “Don’t let anyone take RSS away,” Cridland told the room, tying the history lesson to his real argument about podcasting’s defining feature: openness. Anyone can publish a podcast and several apps and directories allow people to discover and play it. That openness is worth protecting as bigger platforms try to pull the medium onto their own walled gardens, a tension that came up again a few sessions later, once the data on who actually controls those platforms was shared.
TAKEAWAY #3: The next wave of podcast listeners aren’t on podcast platforms yet
Tom Webster’s keynote address shared insights from the fourth year of The Podcast Landscape Study, and the headline findings were less about where podcasting is than how much of the country it still hasn’t reached. Fifteen percent of adults, Webster reported, have no social connection to podcasting at all. They don’t know a single friend who listens to one. Closing that gap, he argued, is where the format’s next real growth must come from.
One finding from Webster’s keynote produced the room’s best moment. When he asked the crowd to guess which platform respondents named most often for podcast consumption, the audience shouted “Apple.” The actual answer was YouTube, with Spotify and Netflix rounding out the top three. Webster noted that Netflix’s podcast-adjacent audience skews younger, is more diverse, and is more likely to have kids at home.
“What even is a podcast anymore?” Webster asked the crowd. “Netflix ain’t it.” Unlike YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, Netflix doesn’t accept creator uploads; it’s a television and movie platform and it’s not built to showcase independent content like the other three. With the rise of video podcasting, Webster also shared how smart TVs emerged as the only device category gaining share with listeners even as growth keeps depending on platforms most podcasters don’t control. The keynote’s closing line echoed Cridland’s session: “We’re not going to have our podcasts if we lose the places that showcase them.”
TAKEAWAY #4: Podcasting now is about personality
This panel traced NPR Music’s own accidental path into podcasting. Robin Hilton, a longtime NPR Music producer, explained that All Songs Considered began because listeners kept writing in, including by actual mail, asking what songs had played during a given episode of All Things Considered. That curiosity became its own show, which Hilton credited to three early decisions: putting music fans over music journalists, bringing live video to NPR first, and live webcasting concerts well before it was standard practice. NPR Music built on that foundation with Tiny Desk in 2008 and New Music Friday a decade later, both born, in Hilton’s words, from being “aggressively nonstrategic.”
The panel shifted the conversation to where podcasting is now. “I think podcasts are more personality-driven than ever before,” Hilton said, contrasting today’s landscape with a public radio tradition built to be audience-driven rather than built around a single host’s persona. Video came up as the next phase of podcasting, a consistent theme we’ve heard at podcast conferences this year at home and abroad. But the panel’s most pointed comment aimed at one piece of podcasting’s future: AI-generated content and music. As the panel put it, they are “the worst thing on the planet.” It’s a blunt line, but it fits the larger case for keeping a human hand in podcast production. Modern editing tools may use AI to help with the tedious parts of production, but audiences can tell when a podcast stops sounding like a real person.
Conclusion
Podcast Movement’s NYC debut showcased an industry old enough to have its own founding myths, popular enough to worry about who shows up to define it, and still skeptical about the platforms hosting its next chapter. Every takeaway points to a conclusion we first observed after On Air Fest Podcast Business Summit and every other stop we took on this year’s conference circuit: the fundamentals haven’t changed, but the effort required to protect them has gone up.
At The Podglomerate, we help creators and brands navigate the shifts in the industry, from podcast production to audience growth and SEO to monetization. If this year’s Podcast Movement raises a question about where your show fits into what’s next, reach out to us. And make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for tips, news, and more information on the podcast industry.
