A Quick Note on Substack and Search Visibility
Lately I’ve noticed something strange: you can publish a widely read Substack piece, name institutions, cite evidence, break real news — and Google acts like none of it ever happened.
This isn’t paranoia; it’s structural. Substack pages are only partially indexed, metadata is limited, dynamic loading hides content from crawlers, and screenshots (which many of us rely on) simply don’t exist to Google. The result: writers with thousands of readers appear invisible on the public web.
Maybe Substack wants a closed ecosystem. Fine. But if the goal is real publishing — public record, journalism, accountability — then basic search visibility isn’t optional.
So here’s the ask:
If Substack doesn’t intend to keep its writers in search anonymity, it might be time to strengthen SEO.
Readers search the open web. Our work should live there too.
There are pros and cons to this argument. However, there is so much valuable information, facts, analysis, ideas in SUBSTACK by writers, journalists, historians etc. that MSM can never even begin to approximate that leaving it out is a huge mistake.
Is there something about Substack that makes it harder to share links to the content? I agree it is a shame that search engines are not able to increase the readership of the fabulous articles found there.