The short version: italicise the podcast’s name (the show itself) and put quotation marks around individual episode titles, the same way you’d treat a TV series and its episodes. That’s Chicago Manual of Style and MLA guidance, and it’s the one that reads best online too. AP style skips italics altogether and puts everything in quotes, which is fine if that’s the house rule you’re already using, but pick one system and stop switching mid-document because that’s the actual mistake I see most.
I get asked this more than you’d think, mostly by clients who’ve hired a copywriter or content writer and then panic slightly when they see the draft back, because half of them expected quotes and half expected bold. Podcasts are still a young enough medium that nobody agreed on the rules before millions of people started writing about them, so the confusion is completely understandable. Here’s how to sort it for your own writing, whether that’s a blog post, a book, a press release, or a LinkedIn article.
What the major style guides say
There isn’t one universal rule, which is half the problem. Three big style guides handle it differently:
- Chicago Manual of Style, the one most publishers, academics, and long-form writers use, treats a podcast the way it treats a television series. The show name gets italics: The Daily. An individual episode gets quotation marks: “The Situation in Ukraine, Explained.”
- MLA style, common in academic and student writing, does the same thing. Container (the show) in italics, the specific piece inside it (the episode) in quotes.
- AP style, which most newspapers and a lot of PR and marketing copy follows, avoids italics almost entirely because older printing and wire systems couldn’t reliably transmit them. AP puts podcast names in quotation marks too, so you’d see “The Daily” for both the show and the episode, distinguished only by context.
You can read more about how Chicago and AP diverge on formatting conventions on the Wikipedia page for the Chicago Manual of Style, which is a decent neutral summary if you want the history without buying either guide.
The example that clarified this for me
I had a guest post come in from a freelance writer a few years back, an article about marketing podcasts worth listening to. In one paragraph she wrote Marketing School, in the next she wrote “How I Built This,” and by the third she’d dropped formatting altogether and just written Akimbo like it was someone’s name. Three different treatments in about 400 words, all for the same category of thing: a podcast name.
I sent it back with one instruction: pick one system for the whole piece. She went with italics for shows, and it read cleaner instantly, not because either rule is objectively correct, but because consistency is what a reader’s eye notices. Nobody consciously registers “ah, Chicago style.” They register that something feels sorted or feels sloppy.
That one edit took maybe four minutes with find-and-replace once she’d chosen a rule. I’ve now made that same fix on probably thirty or forty guest posts and client drafts over the years, and it’s almost always the same issue: not wrong information, just inconsistent formatting, which reads as careless even when the writing itself is good.
Why podcasts specifically confuse people
Books, films, and albums have had agreed formatting for decades, so most writers don’t think twice about italicising a novel title. Podcasts sit in an odd spot because:
- They’re audio, like an album, which traditionally gets italics for the album and quotes for the track.
- They’re episodic, like TV, which gets italics for the series and quotes for the episode.
- They live mostly online, where a lot of platforms strip formatting anyway, so writers have gotten lazy about applying any rule at all.
Add to that the fact that podcast names themselves are often deliberately plain, lowercase, punctuation-free brand names (think “how i built this” as Guy Raz’s team sometimes stylises it on Spotify), and you get genuine ambiguity about what the “correct” version of the title even is before you’ve decided how to format it.
A step-by-step way to decide your own rule
- Check if you’re writing inside an existing style guide. If you’re writing for a newspaper, a corporate blog with an established style sheet, or an academic paper, that decision is already made for you. Use it.
- If there’s no house rule, default to Chicago/MLA logic. Show name italicised, episode name in quotes. It’s the most widely taught convention and it matches how readers already parse book series, TV shows, and albums.
- Write your rule down somewhere you’ll reuse it. A one-line note in your brand style guide or a pinned Google Doc saves you re-deciding this every single time you mention a podcast.
- Apply it to your whole document before you publish, using find-and-replace where you can. If you’ve written five podcast mentions in a 1,500-word post, check all five match before you hit publish, not just the first one.
- Ignore italics for casual mentions in social copy. LinkedIn, X, and most social platforms don’t render italics reliably at all, so trying to force the rule there is wasted effort. Save the formatting discipline for blog posts, newsletters, and anything that goes into a CMS with proper rich text.
The bit most style guide articles won’t tell you
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about this whole debate: almost none of your readers will notice if you get it wrong, and most professional publications aren’t fully consistent about it either. I’ve pulled up big-name outlets covering podcast recommendations and found the same publication italicising a show name in one article and quoting it in another, sometimes written by different freelancers, sometimes by the same person on a different day. Style guides exist to create consistency within one document or one publication, not to enforce a universal law that every reader is silently judging you against.
What damages your credibility isn’t picking AP over Chicago. It’s switching formatting three times inside one blog post, which signals you didn’t proofread, or worse, that three different tools or writers touched the piece without anyone checking it read as one voice. If you’re using AI tools to help draft content, this is exactly the kind of inconsistency that slips through, because each generated paragraph might default to a slightly different convention unless you specify one up front and check the output.
There’s also a practical web reality nobody mentions: WordPress, Squarespace, and most CMS platforms will happily let you italicise a title in the editor, but when that content gets pulled into an email newsletter template, an RSS feed, or a social preview card, the italics tag frequently gets stripped. So the rule you’re fighting so hard to apply might disappear the moment your content leaves its original home. That doesn’t mean don’t bother, it means don’t lose sleep over it either. Get it right in the source document, and treat everything downstream as out of your control.
What this looks like in practice
Using Chicago-style logic, here’s how a real paragraph would read:
“I’ve been listening to Marketing School most mornings this year, and their episode ‘Why Most Businesses Fail at Content Marketing’ changed how I brief my team. I also dip into The Tim Ferriss Show for longer interviews, though I skip most episodes unless the guest is someone I already respect.”
Notice the show names carry italics, the episode title sits in quotes, and nothing else in the sentence gets special formatting, not the host’s name, not the network, not the app you listened on. That restraint matters. Over-formatting (bolding host names, italicising app names, underlining for emphasis) is its own kind of clutter, and I see it almost as often as the under-formatting problem.
What I do on my own site
On my own blog and in my newsletter, I use italics for the show name and quotes for episode titles, matching Chicago, because it’s the convention most of my readers will have absorbed unconsciously from books and TV writing over the years. I keep that rule in my content style sheet alongside things like how I handle numbers under ten and whether I use the Oxford comma (I do, always). It took writing that one-page style sheet, maybe twenty minutes total, to stop this exact question coming up every single time a writer on my team mentions a podcast in a draft.
Frequently asked questions
Do I italicise podcast episode titles too, or just the show name?
Under Chicago and MLA style, only the show name gets italics. The episode title goes in quotation marks, the same treatment you’d give a chapter title inside a book or an episode title inside a TV series.
Is there one correct way to format podcast titles?
No single universally correct rule exists. Chicago and MLA favour italics for the show and quotes for episodes, while AP style avoids italics and puts everything in quotation marks. What matters more than which rule you pick is applying it consistently across the whole piece.
Does formatting podcast titles correctly affect SEO?
Not directly. Search engines don’t rank content higher for correctly italicised titles. What it does affect is reader trust and readability, and how the content renders once it leaves your CMS for email or social can vary regardless of how carefully you format it originally.
Should I italicise podcast titles in social media posts?
Generally, no, because most platforms including LinkedIn and X either strip formatting or make it unreliable to apply. Save consistent italics or quotes for blog posts, newsletters, and documents where your formatting will render as intended.
