Google Podcasts ‘For You’ episode recommendations now available on the web

Abner Li | Apr 16 2021 - 2:23 pm PT

In recent months, Google Podcasts has been relatively quiet about its upcoming work. Until then, one feature that’s now widely available sees “For You” episode recommendations come to the Google Podcasts web app.

On Android and iOS, the “Explore” tab opens to a “For you” feed of recommended episodes based on your subscriptions and listening history. These suggestions are now available on podcasts.google.com as a carousel underneath “Your subscriptions.”

This homepage previously just surfaced top shows in several categories, as well as what’s “Popular & trending.” Each suggested episode card features the podcast name, publisher, title, and description. The play button doubles as the duration count. There are 21 episodes in the carousel that correspond to what appears in the mobile apps.

With the addition of episode recommendations, the discovery aspects of Google Podcasts have reached feature parity between Android/iOS and the web. The latter still lacks a queue and offline downloads.

Google has been quiet about what’s next for Podcasts with the last update happening in December to support subscribing via RSS. This is useful for shows that have paid member-only feeds. Meanwhile, at the start of the year, Google redesigned the Now Playing UI with a cleaner layout that has since rolled out of the beta channel.

This redesign is meant to make way for an extra button that we enabled to let users ‘heart’ a podcast to “show more like this,” as well as do the opposite. Google has yet to announce or launch that addition.