Medium SEO in 2026
It comes down to one setting.
In 2024 I wrote a piece called Why I Don't Care Much About SEO on Medium. I meant it at the time.
Then SEO became my single biggest source of traffic on Substack and Medium over the years. Bigger than the algorithm. Bigger than shares.
What changed wasn't Medium. It was one setting.
Custom domain
By default, your Medium articles live at medium.com/@yourname/some-title. A few hundred thousand other writers share that domain. Google sees a Medium article. Not your article.
Connect a custom domain and that changes a lot. Mine live at stories.byburk.net. Same Medium, same editor, same everything. Different address. And Google treats that address as mine.
Numbers
I don't have to guess whether it works. I can see it in Google Search Console.
My Medium pulls millions of search impressions. A few thousand clicks a month, every month, from people typing something into Google and landing on my stuff.
Medium isn’t sending me readers. It does too, of course. But this is entirely Google. It compounds while I sleep, and it doesn't stop when a post drops out of the feed. That is the part the feed can't give you.
Titles
I hate title SEO. Ends up in boring titles. Sometimes it’s okay and I cave in. Often I just ignore it.
A clever title wins claps on Medium. A searchable title wins Google. They're rarely the same title. Pick and choose.
If you want Google, "My Favorite Terminal, Revisited" gets nothing. "Best Terminal for Mac" gets typed into Google a few thousand times a month.
I do it more often now. I resisted this for years.
Evergreen over news
News dies in a day. Usually.
Search rewards the opposite. "How to X", "best Y", "is Z worth it" get searched every month, for years. Usually. My oldest pieces still bring in Google readers I wrote for once and forgot about.
Evergreen is good.
Downsides
The usual: Medium's algorithm, Medium's rules, Medium's paywall deciding who gets to read past the third paragraph. Google sends the reader over, Medium's wall can still turn them away.
AI Overviews are eating search clicks too. Google answers the question itself now, and the reader never clicks through. Less traffic than a year ago, for everyone. Not just Medium.
Which is why I do the same thing on Substack, where I own the email list. Same idea, my list, no paywall.
The Bottom Line
SEO on Medium isn't exciting. It's a domain setting, boring titles, and a lot of waiting.
But I get readers every single day from posts I forgot I wrote. Two years ago I said I didn't care about this.
I care now.
