Five million podcasts exist.
AI engines cite about thirty.
A six-month study logged 5,214 citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to find out which podcasts they actually pull from. This ebook breaks down what it found, and what separates a show the engines read from one they never see.
- Why the shows that lost mostly did not lose on content quality
- The five-point spec every top-cited show shares
- Six ways branded podcasts get built that guarantee invisibility
- A 90-day sequence you can run without hiring anyone
- A full sources page, every figure attributed
Written by the team producing for Salesforce, Honda & Stanford
3,000+ podcasts launched. 50,000+ episodes produced. Since 2014.
Nine pages. No filler, no brochure.
Written to be handed to a CMO who will check the sources. Every external figure is attributed on the final page.
Your buyers stopped clicking
What changed in AI search, with the numbers: 527% traffic growth, AI Overviews on roughly half of searches, and 93% of AI sessions ending with no click at all.
The most under-worked surface in AI search
The Podcast Citation Index findings in full: 5,214 citations, 187 shows, five engines, and the single operational finding that decided most of the rankings.
What a citable show actually looks like
The five characteristics every top-cited show shares, mapped to the production decision behind each one. Plus two very large shows that underperform, and why.
Why launching a podcast is not the strategy
Six ways branded podcasts get built that guarantee they are never cited. This is the chapter most agencies would rather you did not read.
The build spec
How each research finding translates into a specific production decision, from transcript structure to cadence to running audio and video off one session.
What to do in the next 90 days
A week-by-week sequence you can run yourself, starting with an audit that takes an afternoon and costs nothing.
We did not run this study. We read it, twice.
Every figure in this ebook traces back to The Podcast Citation Index 2026, published by Everything-PR in July. We are not asking you to take our word for any of it. We are showing you what was measured, over what period, across which engines, so you can go and check it yourself.
What is ours is the second half: reading those findings carefully and turning them into a production specification a real show can be built against. That is the work, and it is most of the ebook.
Somebody is already the answer to your category's questions.
It may as well be you.
Thirty minutes covers which buyer questions you should be trying to own, what your current extractability looks like, and whether a show is the right instrument for your situation. If it is not, we will say so.