Can I game Spotify's SEO?
Spotify's ranking has always been atrocious with complaints dating back to inception. I was curious whether their search had improved in the last 10 years. Do they have concepts analogous to Google's schema markup or knowledge graphs? How's the freshness of results?
I had a playlist accidentally pop off (1k+ followers a week) years ago. This remains one of my proudest moments. Recently, I made a fire playlist, yet again, and decided to use this as a chance to conduct a little experiment into Spotify "SEO".
Experiment Log
Seed Query: "vibe coding"
Results: Mostly podcasts. Tabs ordered Podcasts → Video → Playlists.
This is expected. I know Spotify's algorithm heavily favors podcasts and there's definitely podcast content matching this query. But this made me curious about search behavior. Do more people tend to search nouns or verbs when looking for playlists? (i.e. "vibe coding" or would they search "vibe code"?) Realistically, "vibe coding" feels more colloquial. Similar to how most people don't search for "run playlist" for running music, but I backlogged this linguistic rabbit hole for later. Tab order suggests Spotify pushes talk/video content for this head term. Hard to fight the surface area here. I parked this direction.
Narrow Scope: Rename to "vibe coding kpop"
Results: My playlist appears #2. Tab order: Playlists > Artists > Podcasts.
My playlist is ~50% kpop, so I thought a little refinement might be nice. Maybe this is a personalization bump but not like I have another phone *shrug*.
Synonym Test: Rename to "vibe code"
Results: Podcasts still dominate but my playlist shows up at #4. Results very different from "vibe coding".
Exact phrasing matters. And their entity recognition is weak. Curiously I saw podcasts & videos had the exact same results.
Early sense
Spotify search seems to heavily factor their own business strategy + personalization. Putting relevance lower in priority (not accurate to term/characters). Spotify's indexing/ranking isn't consistent across closely related terms nor sessions so this was very confusing to me. Their search is still shit but I'd rather call it a recommendation system. They succeed in pushing their content to you. Pretentious, thinking their music taste is the best.
Maybe I'll try experimenting a bit more with quality/engagement signals.
Backlog of Questions
- Recency bias: Do newer playlists get a temporary boost?
- Content impact: How much do genre cohesion and trending artists move rank vs. pure title matching?
- Trending data: Does TikTok/Spotify trend velocity feed search ranking, or just recommendations?
- Personalization strength: How different are ranks across accounts with distinct histories?
- Keyword "playlist": Likely pointless—people are lazy typers; the UI already knows you want playlists.
(not trying to promote BUTTT….If You Want the Playlist 😜)