Most show notes look the same: a short paragraph summarizing the episode, a list of links mentioned, maybe a timestamped outline if the host is diligent. It gets published, it sits on the episode page, and it's rarely looked at again once the episode is a few weeks old.
That's a lot of unused surface area. Show notes could be doing far more work than they currently do for most shows.
They're usually written for search engines that never come
A lot of show notes are written with SEO in mind, but plain paragraph text summarizing an audio episode isn't a strong search asset on its own. What actually gets indexed and found is structured, specific, scannable content, which is exactly what most show notes aren't.
They rarely connect episodes to each other
Long-running shows build up a real body of knowledge across hundreds of episodes, but show notes almost never help a new listener find the three episodes most relevant to a topic they care about. Each episode's notes exist in isolation, disconnected from everything else in the archive.
They don't capture anything reusable
If a guest gives a genuinely good framework, a strong answer to a recurring question, or a resource worth returning to, that content is usually buried in a timestamp inside a paragraph, not surfaced as something a listener could actually use again.
"Show notes get written for search engines that never come, and buried content that never gets found."
None of this means show notes need to disappear. It means they're underbuilt for what a podcast archive is actually capable of, especially once a show has real episode volume behind it.