How to Set Up a New Substack 2026
For Google Search 2026
Most Substack publications don’t show up on Google. Substack is not bad at SEO. It isn’t great either, but’s it’s very doable.
It’s just the missing setup. Or the wrong one. Or it never really happened.
I spent way too long writing before I started figuring out what the foundation should look like when you want your Substack to show up on Google and attract search traffic. Once I had it, search traffic not only started showing up, but grew consistently and became my #1 source or Substack growth.
This is the setup. It takes about half an hour. You only do it once.
Custom domain first
This is the one I’d put before anything else. Substack lets you connect your own domain for $50, one time. Mine is letters.byburk.net.
The default yourname.substack.com address is shared with everyone else’s reputation. Yours is just yours. Google rewards that over time.
The other reason: SEO traffic on your own domain travels with you. Move off Substack one day, your rankings come too.
$50, once. Totally worth it.
Google Search Console, before you publish anything else
Go to search.google.com/search-console. Add your custom domain as a property. Verify it. Submit your sitemap.
Your sitemap lives at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Just paste that URL into Search Console.
Without this step, Google might still find you eventually. Or not. With it, you’re telling Google “here is everything, please come look.”
It also shows you what people are searching for to land on your pieces. Which is useful for the next thing you write.
Check that you’re not blocked
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. Make sure it doesn’t say Disallow: /. Substack handles this fine by default, but worth checking once.
Then go to Substack settings, Privacy, and confirm your publication isn’t set to private or invite-only. Sounds obvious. People still mess this up.
Fix your About page
Write something other than the default text that’s there. Many don’t do that.
Yours should answer two questions: what you write about, and why someone should subscribe. Use the words people would search for.
If you write about Substack growth, the words “Substack” and “growth” should be in there. Not stuffed. Just present. Same for whatever your topic is.
Use sections if you write multiple different topics
Substack lets you create sections. It’s a bit messy, and they could do it a lot better. But still, sections are a great asset if you have a diverse set of topics you write about that don’t really fit one broader category.
That being said, I don’t do that. Mostly because I hadn’t done it from the start, and then it was too much manual work for me to do it later.
Why sections? They give Google another way to understand what your publication is about. Each section becomes its own indexable page with its own articles grouped under it.
Three or four sections is plenty. Don’t go wild.
Publish-time checklist
Every time I hit publish, I go through the same four things.
Title. Includes the actual words people would search for. “How to Set Up Substack for Google Search“. Not religiously. But I give it a second thought.
URL slug. Substack auto-generates a slug from your title. Sometimes it’s bad. Edit it. Keep it short, keep the keywords, drop fillers.
Subtitle / SEO description. Substack uses this for the meta description Google shows under your title. One sentence. Says what the piece is about.
Cover image. Add one. Substack uses it for OpenGraph and Google Discover. A piece without a cover image looks half-broken in search results.
That’s it. Maybe two minutes per article.
Link your old pieces to your new ones
Every new article gets one or two links to older relevant pieces. Then I open those older pieces and add a link back to the new one.
It’s a little bit of busywork. Five minutes per piece. A great use case for AI, by the way.
This is what tells Google your archive is alive. Connected. Worth crawling. A pile of unconnected articles looks dead.
I went deeper on the writing side of this in how I do Substack SEO. The setup above is the foundation.
What ranks
Once the setup is in place, certain pieces climb and others don’t.
Comparisons may rank. How-tos may rank. Pricing breakdowns may rank. Anything with a year in the title may rank. Or they won’t. It’s really not guaranteed, but it’s better to try.
That being said, personal essays don’t really rank on Google and shouldn’t really. It’s not search content. You know what I mean? Opinion pieces don’t either. Anything too generic doesn’t.
You don’t have to choose, though. Mix it up. I don’t just write for SEO. I want SEO to feed my publication. Not control it.
Frustrating things
Substack’s editor is basic. No proper headers beyond H2, H3…, no real table of contents, no schema markup. You work with what you’ve got.
Search Console takes 3–7 days to start showing data. Then a few weeks to show patterns. It’s slow-ish. Be patient.
A custom domain Substack also starts from zero on Google’s trust meter. You’re building it up, one piece at a time. But it will be better in the long-term.
And not everything you write will rank. I had to come around on this myself. The pieces I love most aren’t usually the ones that show up in search. That’s fine. They have a different job.
The Bottom Line
Custom domain. Search Console. About page. Sections. A few SEO settings. And some good topics. That’s my checklist at publish time. Internal links between old and new.
That’s the whole setup. Half an hour, once. Then a few minutes per article forever after.
The email gives you today. SEO gives you next year. You can have both.