Will Your Substack Rank in Google Search?

One of the questions I’ve been hearing more often lately is this:

“Can my Substack articles rank in Google?”

The short answer is yes.

In fact, many Substack publications, myself included, receive a significant amount of traffic from Google search. Public posts are indexed by search engines just like articles on a traditional website or blog, and with the rise of AI-powered search, many of those same articles are also becoming sources that AI tools use to answer people’s questions.

But before we dive into how search works, I think there’s a different question to ask first.

Do you even need to worry about SEO? On Substack, you don’t have to worry about SEO in the same way you would if you were writing a traditional blog. This is one of the things I appreciate most about Substack, it gives us multiple ways to build an audience. You can grow entirely through Notes, recommendations, collaborations, Lives, and by building relationships with other writers. You don’t have to think about Google at all if that’s not how you want to grow your publication.

Many writers simply want to write thoughtful essays for the community they’ve already built. They aren’t trying to attract hundreds of new readers through search engines, and that’s perfectly valid.

Not every article needs to rank in Google. Sometimes we simply have something we want to share with the people who have already chosen to subscribe. Those pieces are written from the heart, for our existing readers, and they don’t need to answer a specific question or solve a particular problem.

Other articles are different. They answer questions that you hear repeatedly from your readers or clients. They explain a concept that people struggle with. They solve a common problem. These are the articles that often have the greatest potential to be discovered through search, because someone, somewhere, is already looking for that answer.

My take on creating articles is that I don’t think it’s helpful to write for Google but I do think it’s worthwhile, once you’ve finished writing, to ask yourself: If someone searched for the problem I’m solving in this article, would they be able to find my article?

That’s a very different mindset than chasing keywords or trying to “game” the algorithm. Instead, you’re trying to make your work easier to discover.

So how does Google, and increasingly AI-powered search, actually find your content?

Contrary to what many people assume, Google isn’t ranking your publication because it’s on Substack. It’s ranking individual articles.

Each article is evaluated on its own merits. Does it clearly answer the question someone searched for? Is it well organized? Does it demonstrate real knowledge or experience? Is it useful enough that someone would actually benefit from reading it?

AI-powered search works in much the same way. Whether someone is searching through Google, asking ChatGPT or Claude a question, or using another AI search tool, those systems are looking for content that clearly answers a question and comes from a source that demonstrates experience and expertise.

That means the qualities that make an article helpful to a human reader are often the same qualities that make it easier for search engines to understand.

• Clear headings.

• Specific topics.

• A descriptive title.

• Well-organized writing.

• Original experience.

None of those things require you to change your writing style. They simply make your ideas easier to understand.

Substack also gives us a few places where we can help search engines better understand our work.

When you’re preparing to publish a post (in the post settings) you’ll find “SEO settings” which gives you places for an SEO title, SEO description, and the post URL.

These aren’t the places to be clever, witty, or creative, instead, think about how someone would actually search for your article. Your post URL also needs to be descriptive. Before publishing, take a moment to replace an automatically generated or vague URL with something short and descriptive. Clear URLs help search engines understand the topic of your article.

One of my favorite examples to use for this is my friend Diane Burley who writes Musings of a Storyteller. She wrote an article last year about tinnitus. She titled it “My Own Private Symphony” which is a catchy title that one of her readers would want to click on. But her URL was “impact-tinnitus-family”, and her SEO title was “How to Deal with the Disruption of Tinnitus” — both things that someone dealing with tinnitus may actually search for, in contrast to her fun title for her readers. Diane has spent years learning and writing about Search and her expertise shows.

The same idea applies to the meta description. Rather than writing something mysterious or poetic, use that space to briefly explain what problem the article solves and what readers will learn, and if you’re someone who does interviews or talks about other people in your article, this is definitely the place to name-drop, to increase your chances of coming up in search for that name.

One of the simplest, and often overlooked, ways to strengthen your publication is by linking your articles together.

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been doing this throughout the past few months. When I wrote about Hero Posts, I linked back to my article about About Pages. My article about Welcome Emails connected naturally to both of those.

This isn’t just helpful for search engines, but more importantly, it’s helpful for readers.

When someone finishes reading one article, you’re giving them a logical next step rather than leaving them at the end of the page wondering where to go next.

Over time, those connections begin to form a body of work instead of a collection of unrelated posts.

If you’ve been following along over the past few months, you’ve probably noticed that many of these articles build on one another. That’s intentional. Each article adds another piece to the larger picture, making it easier for readers to continue learning without having to start over every time.

That approach also helps search engines understand the relationships between your articles. You’re creating an interconnected publication rather than a series of isolated posts.

Ultimately, I don’t think good SEO is about chasing algorithms.

Search engines are trying to do the same thing you are: trying to connect someone who has a question with someone who has a thoughtful answer.

So don’t write for Google. Write for people with questions.

Then take a few extra minutes before you publish to make it as easy as possible for Google, and your future readers, to understand that you’ve answered them.