Substack: get your custom-domain newsletter pages indexed

Substack's editorial flow is great. The SEO flow is not. New posts get a sitemap entry, but Substack doesn't ping the Indexing API, and Google's crawl cadence for medium-traffic newsletters is unpredictable. Pushing each post through IndexerNow closes the gap.

Custom-domain setup matters

• Set up your custom domain in Substack settings (e.g., posts.yourname.com).
• Verify the custom domain in Search Console.
• Sign into IndexerNow with the Google account that owns the verification.
• Your post URLs are now eligible for the Indexing API.

Per-post push workflow

1. Publish the post. Substack sends the email.
2. Grab the public web URL (posts.yourname.com/p/post-slug).
3. Push to IndexerNow. Free quota covers 10 posts/day, which is far more than any newsletter ships.
4. After 24h, check Status to confirm indexed.

Substack-specific gotchas

• Posts behind the paywall return a partial-content page to Google. They can still rank, but the indexed content is limited to the preview.
• Substack's sitemap.xml lives at /sitemap.xml on your custom domain.
• Avoid changing post slugs after publish — Substack does NOT 301 the old slug.