Glossary
What are show notes?
By the KeyMo team · Updated
Show notes are the written material published with a podcast episode: a short summary, the guests, links to everything mentioned, and timestamps for the main topics. They help listeners decide whether to press play and give you a place to point from a clip.
Show notes, defined
The phrase is used in the plural even when people mean one block of text. Show notes sit in the episode description in a podcast app, on the show's own episode page, or under a video in the description box. They are not a transcript. A transcript is every word that was said; show notes are what a person chose to say about it.
The W3C accessibility pages make the same split from the other side. For audio-only content such as a podcast, they say captions are not required to meet WCAG but a transcript is, at Level A. Show notes alone are not a transcript.
What goes in them: an annotated example
Here is a made-up episode laid out field by field.
| Part | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Title line | Says who and what | Ep. 42: Hiring your first editor, with Dana Cole |
| Summary | Two or three sentences a stranger can judge in ten seconds | Dana explains why she stopped hiring for speed and started hiring for taste. |
| Timestamps | Lets people jump to a topic | 00:00 Intro, 04:10 The first bad hire, 21:35 What a trial edit looks like |
| Links | Everything named in the episode | Dana's portfolio, the book she mentions, the tool she uses |
| Call to action | One next step | Subscribe, or reply with your own question |
If the same episode is on YouTube, the timestamp list can double as chapters. YouTube's rules are specific: the list starts at 00:00, needs at least three timestamps in ascending order, and each chapter must be at least 10 seconds. See chapters and timestamp.
How clips relate to show notes
Show notes and clips do different jobs from the same episode. Show notes describe the whole thing for people who might listen. A clip shows one moment to people who have not decided yet.
- The timestamps in your notes are a ready list of moments worth checking for clips.
- A clip's caption or description should point to the full episode, and the episode's notes should link back to the clips you posted.
- If you pull a quote into a clip, make sure it still matches what the notes say about it.
KeyMo works from video: a YouTube link on a paid plan, or an MP4 or MOV upload. It returns up to 15 vertical clips, each with a score out of 10 and a one-line reason. Those reasons can jog your memory about what was strong in the episode, but you still write your own notes. See podcast clip.
Common mistakes
- Pasting the transcript and calling it show notes, which buries the summary and the links.
- Leaving out the guest's name, which is what people search for.
- Writing a summary that gives away no reason to listen.
- Timestamps that drift after you edit the episode. Update them after the final cut.
- Forgetting links, which are the main reason people open show notes at all.
Show notes vs nearby terms
| Term | Covers | Written by |
|---|---|---|
| Show notes | Summary, links, timestamps | The host or producer |
| Transcript | Every spoken word | A person or software |
| Chapters | Titled sections in the player | The host, or the platform automatically |
To draft notes from an episode, there is a show notes generator.
Sources: W3C WAI: Captions/Subtitles (checked 11 October 2026); YouTube Help: Video chapters (checked 11 October 2026).