If you’d have asked me five years ago whether every professional services firm should have a podcast, I probably would have shrugged. Nice idea. Great for some businesses. Probably unnecessary for most.

I don’t think that anymore.

Good marketers know that most marketing tactics borrow someone else’s attention. A well-placed ad interrupts a social media scroll. An email earns a click. A strong social post sparks a conversation. These things all have real value to a business, but they also share a common limitation: they’re transactional. They create a moment of engagement, but trust creates a long-term relationship.

The kind of trust that makes someone choose one business over another works differently. It accumulates over time by repeated exposure to someone’s thinking, voice, and perspective. That kind of trust used to take years to build. You met people at conferences, gave presentations, had coffee, and just kept showing up. Eventually, people got to know how you thought. I think podcasting has changed that equation. For businesses willing to commit to it, it compresses years of relationship building into something that can happen in hours while someone is walking the dog, driving to work, or mowing the lawn.

Audio Does Something Writing Rarely Can

I should probably admit that I’m a writer first.

I love writing. Always will.

But I’ve come to believe that audio accomplishes something writing rarely can.

When someone reads a blog post or scrolls through your LinkedIn feed, they’re encountering a carefully constructed version of you. That’s not a criticism; it’s simply the nature of writing. We all revise. We move paragraphs around. We delete the parts that don’t quite work. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

A conversation is different.

When people hear you speak, they’re hearing more than your ideas. They’re hearing your confidence, your curiosity, your enthusiasm, and occasionally your uncertainty. They hear the pause while you’re deciding exactly how to answer a question. They hear you laugh at your own story or change your mind halfway through explaining something.

Those moments are hard to fake. More importantly, I think they’re part of how we decide whether someone is trustworthy.

Research has long suggested that people evaluate spoken communication differently than written communication. We don’t simply process the words. We instinctively evaluate the person behind them. That’s one of the reasons public speaking has always been such a powerful way to build credibility, even long before podcasts existed.

But podcasting gives businesses a way to create that same familiarity at a much larger scale.

Think about someone whose podcast you’ve listened to regularly for the past year. Maybe you’ve never met them. Maybe you’ve exchanged a couple of emails at most. But if they walked into the room tomorrow, there’s a good chance you’d feel like you already knew them.

It’s an odd phenomenon, but I think most of us have experienced it.

You don’t know their favorite restaurant or where they went to college. But you know how they think. You know what excites them. You know the kinds of problems they enjoy solving. In many ways, that’s exactly what prospective clients are trying to figure out before they decide to work with you.

I’ve seen this happen firsthand. Prospects occasionally begin a conversation by saying something like, “I feel like I already know you.” We haven’t met. They haven’t read every article we’ve published. They’ve simply spent enough time listening that the introductions are mostly out of the way.

That doesn’t mean the sale is made. It means the trust-building process is already underway.

The AI Effect: Why Audio Just Became Even More Valuable

The timing of all this is interesting because podcasting has become more valuable for another reason entirely.

AI has dramatically lowered the cost of creating written content.

Today, almost any business can publish a decent blog post, newsletter, or LinkedIn article in a fraction of the time it used to take. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I use AI almost every day, and I think it’s one of the most useful tools marketers have gained in years.

But whenever something becomes easier to produce, we naturally place less value on the thing itself.

I think that’s beginning to happen with written content.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think people are reading every article wondering, “Was this written by AI?” Most readers aren’t trying to play detective. I think they’re asking a different question. “Does this feel real?” That’s a subtle distinction, but an important one.

I’ve noticed that when I listen to someone talk for thirty or forty minutes, I stop evaluating the polish of their presentation and start paying attention to the person. Are they thoughtful? Curious? Do they have opinions they can back up? Do they sound like someone I’d actually enjoy working with?

A long-form conversation reveals those things in a way that even excellent writing sometimes can’t.

The rise of AI hasn’t made podcasting less relevant. I think it’s made it more valuable.

Because while AI can help us write, organize, and refine our ideas, people are still looking for evidence that there’s an actual human being behind the expertise.

AI Is Changing More Than Our Writing

There’s another AI dynamic at work here, and I think it’s just as important.

Most of the conversation around AI has focused on how it helps us create content. That’s understandable. It’s the part we can all see. But I think the bigger change is happening on the other side of the equation.

People are changing how they look for information.

Instead of searching Google and clicking through half a dozen websites, more and more people are asking AI assistants direct questions. They want recommendations. They want explanations. They want someone to do the research for them and deliver a useful answer.

That shift has significant implications for businesses.

If someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot, “Who’s best known locally for great design-build work?” or “What should I look for in a financial advisor?” those systems aren’t looking for the company with the catchiest tagline. They’re looking for evidence of expertise.

The businesses that are most likely to show up in AI-generated answers are the ones that have consistently published thoughtful, relevant content around a particular area of expertise. In other words, the businesses that have something meaningful to say—and say it regularly.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve become more interested in podcasting over the past couple of years. A podcast isn’t just another piece of content. It’s a steady stream of original thinking.

Every episode can become a transcript. That transcript can become an article or several shorter pieces of content. Over time, those ideas reinforce the themes your business wants to be known for. You’re not just building an audience. You’re building a body of work that demonstrates your expertise.

That’s really what Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is about.

Despite the name, I don’t think it’s about optimizing for AI. It’s about making your expertise easier to find, understand, and trust—whether the person discovering it is using Google, ChatGPT, or something we haven’t even imagined yet.

To me, that’s a much healthier way to think about the future of search. Because the technology will keep changing. It always does.

But businesses that consistently share useful ideas and demonstrate genuine expertise have always had an advantage. AI hasn’t changed that. If anything, I think it’s amplified it.

Rethinking What Success Looks Like

One of the challenges with podcasting is that we tend to judge it using the same metrics we use for social media. That’s understandable, but I don’t think it’s a fair comparison. Social media is built for reach. Podcasting is built for depth. Those are two very different jobs.

If your goal is to get as many eyeballs as possible, podcasting probably isn’t the right tool. But if your goal is to shorten the time it takes someone to trust your expertise, I’m not sure there’s a better medium available today.

That’s why I don’t think the most meaningful metrics for a business podcast are found inside the podcast platform. They’re found in the conversations that happen because of it. You realize a prospective client already understands your philosophy. A referral feels unusually warm. Someone you’ve never met says, “I’ve been listening to your podcast,” and suddenly you’re not spending the first half of the meeting establishing credibility.

Those aren’t metrics you’ll find in your podcast dashboard, but they’re exactly the kinds of outcomes most businesses are trying to create.

Is Podcasting Right for Every Business?

Probably not.

Podcasting takes time. It takes consistency. It takes the willingness to keep showing up, even when your audience is still small. And perhaps most importantly, it requires having something worthwhile to say on a regular basis.

Not every business needs a podcast, and not every business leader would enjoy producing one. But if your business is built on expertise, if your sales process depends on trust, or if clients are really choosing the people behind the company as much as the company itself, I think podcasting deserves serious consideration.

Not because it’s trendy. Not because everyone else is doing it. But because it gives people a chance to get to know you before they need you.

And in a world where more content is being created than ever before, that kind of familiarity has become surprisingly valuable.

The Bigger Opportunity

AI will continue to change how we create content. It will continue to change how people search for information. Five years from now, the tools we’re using today will almost certainly look different from the ones we’ll be using then.

But I don’t think the fundamental question people ask themselves is going to change.

“Who do I trust?”

That’s the question every prospective client is trying to answer, whether they realize it or not.

Podcasting isn’t the only way to earn trust: there never has been just one way. But in a world where it’s becoming easier to create content than ever before, I think businesses need to think differently about what they’re really trying to build. More articles and more social posts aren’t the goal. More trust is.

If podcasting helps people understand how you think, not just what you do, it has the potential to build that trust faster than almost any other marketing tactic I can think of.

And in an AI world, that’s a competitive advantage worth paying attention to.