How do I get my Substack posts on Google?

Where the Substack sitemap lives

Substack maintains a sitemap for every publication automatically, including the archive.

Why Substack posts don't get indexed

• Paid posts show a preview to Google, so they rank on the preview text alone — usually not at all.
• You can't submit Substack URLs through the Indexing API without owning the domain. A custom domain fixes this.
• Newsletter-style titles ("Issue #47: some thoughts") match no search query. The title is the single biggest lever you control.
• Substack's archive is paginated and old posts sit deep. Link to your evergreen posts from your About page.
• There's no per-post meta description control, so Google builds a snippet from your opening lines — make them count.

Step by step: getting your Substack newsletter into Google

1. Connect a custom domain in Substack's settings.
2. Verify that domain in Google Search Console.
3. Submit https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml under Sitemaps.
4. Retitle your evergreen posts to match real search queries rather than issue numbers.
5. Make the evergreen posts public and keep the paywall for timely or community content.
6. Push newly published post URLs through the Indexing API so they're crawled the same day.

Substack indexing controls at a glance

• Sitemap — https://yourname.substack.com/sitemap.xml — Substack maintains a sitemap for every publication automatically, including the archive.
• robots.txt — Managed by the platform. Substack controls robots.txt for the whole platform. You can't add or remove AI-crawler rules for your publication.
• Rendering — Substack serves rendered HTML for public posts, so crawlers read the full text.
• Hiding a page — There is no per-post noindex control. Publication-level search visibility is a settings option; individual posts are all-or-nothing.
• Custom head code — Not available — no head or template access on this platform.
• llms.txt — No root file access. Your archive page is the closest thing to a content map you control.