Google Drops Playable Podcast Rich Snippets

Google has dropped the playable podcast search result rich snippets. 9to5Google reported this first, and there is a bit of confusion around what exactly Google removed. Google seems to have removed the recent episodes’ playable rich results for podcasts, where Google would show the recent podcasts under a specific search result.

The podcast rich results launched in 2017, I have some screenshots here but this image from 9to5Google shows the before and after in a clear and concise manner:

Here is another version I screen captured from 2019,

Before:

And now it is gone but it has the carousel:

Here is some of the SEO chatter on this change:

It’s the functionality for playing the episode that was in the SERPs that was removed (I think). I never used that, and didn’t really see it much tbh.

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 18, 2023

In that case I take back my “wow”

— Mordy Oberstein 🇺🇦 (@MordyOberstein) January 18, 2023

Likewise, I read an article on this topic this morning yet I’m still seeing them. Matter of time I guess?

— Azeem (@AzeemDigital) January 18, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.