Google Doesn't Care About Your Substack — Until You Do This
Why every "you can't optimize Substack for SEO" post is DEAD wrong.
This is completely false.
The rumor goes like this: you can’t optimize for Google on Substack, so don’t bother.
I’ve heard it from established writers and even seen it parroted in every “tips for new Substackers” thread that gets resurfaced every other Tuesday.
It’s wrong. And it’s bleeding traffic, subscribers, and authority out of Substacks that should be ranking by now.
And no — I’m not blowing smoke. A live button you can click below to see my sitemap indexed at my domain — not Substack’s. No “trust me, bro.” Just the file Google is actually reading.
☝ That was from an article I just posted over the weekend!
Now let me show you why this matters more than almost anything else you’ll read about Substack this year.
The Catch Nobody Tells You
Sign up for Substack and you get an address that looks like this:
yourname.substack.com
But here’s the thing. It’s not really a website. It’s tenancy.
Substack owns the building. You rent a unit. Every word you publish, every backlink someone gives you, and every share that goes viral on X — Google looks at all of it and quietly logs the authority under substack.com. Not yours. Theirs.
Read that again.
You can write the most extraordinary newsletter in your niche. Get featured. Get recommended. Get restacked into oblivion. And when someone Googles a topic you’ve covered better than anyone, your post might still be invisible, buried under thousands of other something.substack.com subdomains all competing as basically interchangeable to the algorithm.
This is what nobody is telling you. And it’s the entire reason your search traffic looks the way it does.
What Changes the Moment You Buy a Custom Domain
Substack lets you connect your own domain for a one-time fee of $50.
That’s the price. No monthly fees or hidden tiers. Just a one time payment.
Buy a domain at Cloudflare or Namecheap. Point it at Substack via DNS. Substack handles the SSL. Your publication now lives at your address.
And here’s what flips the moment that happens:
1. Google sees a real site. Not a tenant. A site. Authority compounds to you now — every backlink, every share, every minute of dwell time builds equity in your domain instead of someone else’s. This is the foundation of every SEO strategy that has ever worked. You stop subsidizing Substack and start building your own balance sheet.
2. You can verify in Google Search Console. This is the upgrade. Submit your sitemap (Substack generates it for you — yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml) and the lights come on. You see which posts get impressions. Which keywords you’re ranking for. Which posts are climbing. You go from flying blind to flying with instruments. Most Substackers will never know what their search performance actually looks like. You will.
3. Your links stop screaming “I’m a hobbyist.” When you share yourname.com/p/article-title in an email, on LinkedIn, in a guest post — it reads like a publication. People click more. Other writers link more. Backlinks compound. The URL itself does work for you.
4. You can leave one day without losing everything. Read this one carefully. The day Substack changes the rules — and platforms always eventually change the rules — your custom domain leaves with you. Migrate to Ghost, WordPress, your own setup. Every link still works. Google ranking still resolves. The writer who stayed on theirname.substack.com for three years? Watches it all evaporate.
Why This Actually Drives More Traffic
Here’s what most writers miss. And it’s the real reason this works.
A custom domain doesn’t pull you out of Substack. It makes your website native to Substack while also functioning as its own real, standalone site on the open web.
Translation: you don’t lose anything. You add.
You keep the recommendation network, the Notes feed, the discovery engine, the email infrastructure, the subscriber tools, the restacks, the home feed — every internal channel Substack gives you stays exactly where it was. Nothing breaks or turns off. Your readers don’t notice a single difference except your URL looks more professional.
But now Google sees you as a real publication, not a tenant. So while your Substack neighbors are scratching for visibility inside the platform, you’re pulling traffic from two directions at once:
From inside Substack — recommendations, Notes, restacks, the home feed.
From outside Substack — Google search, backlinks, social shares that get clicked because the URL doesn’t look sketchy.
That second channel is the one almost nobody on this platform is using. And it’s the one that compounds the longest.
A Substack-only writer is fishing in one pond. A custom-domain writer is fishing in two — and the second pond doesn’t dry up at midnight when the algorithm cycles.
This is why two equally talented writers can post the same kind of content for two years and end up with wildly different traffic. One is invisible outside the platform. The other is showing up in search results months — years — after publishing.
You want to be the second one.
Now Here’s What I’m Doing for My VIPs
I just bought ChristianBookFinder.com.
Not a subdomain. A clean, keyword-rich, exact-match domain that says exactly what it is — the kind of domain Google has been rewarding for over twenty years and shows no sign of stopping.
And I’m not building it to be mine alone.
My VIPs are getting listed there. Their books and Substacks. All featured on a domain that was built from day one to get found in Christian search traffic. They get a share in the ownership of what this site becomes. As ChristianBookFinder.com grows in authority, every VIP listed on it grows with it. Their books are the post. The author is the headline. The URL is keyword-targeted (christianbookfinder.com/p/the-shepherds-call-by-jane-doe). The title, the meta description, the structure — every element is engineered to surface that book in search and keep surfacing it.
So what they receive is a permanent search asset.
VIPs on ChristianBookFinder.com get:
A dedicated, search-optimized listing post on a clean, keyword-targeted domain — built from the ground up to get found by Christian readers searching Google.
Keyword-rich URLs structured around the book title and author name, the way Google rewards.
Listing in the VIP directory hub — a central indexable page that internally links to every VIP post, multiplying the SEO weight across all of them.
A piece of something growing — not a one-time shoutout, but real shared visibility that compounds as the site builds authority.
VIP listings get the search engine working for the book.
[Subscribe / Become a VIP here]
The early VIPs get the best positioning, the most visibility, and the longest runway as the site builds authority. Latecomers will still benefit. But the ones who show up first always do best — in any directory, on any platform, in any season.
The Pushback You’ll Hear
Some folks will tell you a custom domain is unnecessary. Here’s the noise you’ll have to wade through:
“Substack’s domain has more authority than yours will ever have.”
Sure. For the first few months. Then what? Substack’s authority isn’t yours. It’s a rental. While you wait three years borrowing it, you could have spent three years building your own.
“You’ll lose internal recommendations from other Substacks.”
That was true a few years ago. It isn’t anymore. The recommendation network works perfectly fine with custom domains. You’re not trading one channel for another. You’re stacking.
“Just forward your domain to your Substack URL.”
Don’t. A 301 redirect from yourname.com to yourname.substack.com doesn’t give you the SEO benefit. Google still sees the destination as the Substack subdomain. Congratulations — you’ve spent money on a vanity license plate. Set it up properly or don’t bother.
How to Actually Do This
Here’s the simplest version. The one I’d give a friend over coffee.
Buy a domain. Cloudflare and Namecheap are cheap and don’t try to upsell you on twelve things you don’t need. $10–$15 a year.
Pay Substack the $50 one-time fee. Settings → Domain. They walk you through it.
LOL — my fancy arrows
Add a CNAME record at your registrar. Substack tells you exactly what to type. Use a subdomain like www.yourname.com — Substack requires a subdomain, not the bare root. (Set up a 301 redirect from the root yourname.com to www.yourname.com in your registrar’s settings — most have a one-click option.)
Wait up to 36 hours. DNS takes time. Don’t panic.
Verify your site in Google Search Console. Submit your sitemap (yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml).
That’s it. That’s the whole “secret.” Most “buy your own” domain sites give you step by step instructions. If not, a simple Google search should suffice.
For a step-by-step guide to rank in Google using a custom domain living on Substack — CLICK HERE
The Part Where I Get Honest
Will a custom domain alone make you rank? No.
You still have to write things people actually want to read. With titles people are actually searching for. At a length Google takes seriously — research consistently shows long-form content (1,500+ words) outperforms short posts in search. You still need patience. Search rankings build over months, not days.
But none of that matters if you’re hosting on a subdomain that funnels every ounce of authority away from you.
You can write the best newsletter in your niche and still be invisible on Google because your address is essentially “Apt 4B at the Substack Building.”
Buy the domain. Set it up right. Submit the sitemap.
Then keep writing — and let the work compound for you instead of for someone else.
And if you want a head start? If you’d rather plug into something already built than start from absolute zero?
Come be a VIP. ChristianBookFinder.com is being built for writers who refuse to stay invisible.
Stay sharp.
— Thomas
Good advice.
I do a lot of SEO work on our website but hadn’t occurred to me that wouldn’t work on Substack without a custom domain. However, I’ve also noticed that deliverability of emails is better with Substack which makes me nervous about switching to the custom domain option. So many domain-focused emails shoot straight into spam folders. Do you have any thoughts on this?