How to SEO for Substack
No, ChatGPT didn't kill SEO
Hey Substacker,
Today I want to show you how to use SEO techniques to grow your Substack subscriber list.
As you know, I’ve been on Substack for almost 4 years and I’ve been writing online since 2015, using the power of SEO and content marketing to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of digital products and training courses.
In my first few years on Substack, traffic from search engines wasn’t great. But that’s changed in the past 12 months, with publications hosted on Substack now ranking well in search results.
This is great news for creators because search engines can be a good source of new readers who you can’t easily reach through your usual channels.
But how to ‘do’ SEO on Substack? Let’s dive in.
What is SEO (exactly)?
SEO is search engine optimization.
Search engines are Google, Bing, Firefox, Duck Duck Go and Yahoo! Many AI writing tools also include search engine capabilities, as do YouTube and Pinterest.
Later in this post, I’ll show you why AI tools like ChatGPT haven’t killed SEO, but have actually created new opportunities for online creators.
Search engine optimization is the practice of making your content, like Substack posts, easier for search engines to find and understand so that they show it to people who are searching for information online.
How does SEO work in 2025?
Until recently, search engines like Google were the bridge between people with questions and webpages with answers to those questions.
Pre-2025, if you wanted to rank well in search results as a content creator, there was a simple list of things to do to make it happen. These included submitting a site map, jamming every post and page with keywords, adding metadata, creating special excerpts, chasing high authority sites for backlinks and running paid ads to convince Google to take you seriously.
Further back, there were even more techniques to increase your ranking. For example, in the early 2010s you could trick the algorithms into thinking your website was high-value by creating dozens of meaningless one-page websites and filling them with links to your main website, creating the illusion of authority, a technique called backlink farming.
These days, search engines are much too smart to be tricked by low-value, surface-level hacks like inauthentic backlinks. They are much better at knowing what ‘good’ looks like, and they are pretty adept at knowing what type of content their users will find valuable.
But they have also radically changed the way they serve up that content.
In 2024, AI assistants started appearing on search engine results pages, removing the need for searchers to click through to websites to get answers to their questions.
In 2025, many of us have abandoned searches altogether, favouring AI tools like ChatGPT when we need information.
These days, we can get answers to simple questions without ever needing to click through to a website. We typically only dive into a webpage if we don’t get enough information from an AI-assisted search. Or if we discover we might not have asked the right questions.
In 2025, the journey from a query to a webpage click looks more like this: query ➡ AI-assisted answer ➡ further queries and/or ask for links to sources ➡ click into a webpage(s) that the AI-assistant recommends.
This means that in 2025, creators are only getting clicks from people who want more nuanced information than an AI assistant can provide. That is, we get fewer clicks for generic questions like “Can I have two publications with one Substack account?” and more clicks for questions that need detailed answers or multiple perspectives like “Is Substack worth it in 2025?”.
In 2025, searches are more conversational and sentence-like than they used to be, driven in part by the fact that many searches are now voiced rather than typed.
For example, if you wanted to know about Substack in 2023, you might have typed “Substack” or “What is Substack” into a search engine. However in 2025, you’d be more likely to ask a search engine or AI tool “Tell me about Substack: what is it, why is it so popular, and is it really a good way for writers to make money?”
2023 search: “What is Substack?”
2025 search: “Tell me about Substack: what is it, why is it so popular, and is it really a good way for writers to get paid?”
Why bother with SEO for Substack in 2025?
Smart creators optimize for searches in 2025 for the same reasons we always have: to get our work seen by people who need it.
Optimized content shows up in search engine results. And it informs the results for AI-generated answers.
If an AI tool likes your content, it will share links and snippets to your content. People seeking deep insights, personal perspectives or related information will click through. So no, ChatGPT did not kill SEO.
Is SEO worth doing for your publication?
SEO is not a one-size-fits-all solution to extra traffic for every Substack publication. Some types of publications will do well with SEO, others will not.
To know whether you should be worrying about SEO, answer these questions:
Would anyone on the internet actively search for information in your posts?
Can you think of a search query someone might use that you can answer perfectly?
Does your content provide answers to questions that aren’t already comprehensively addressed by popular websites?
Is at least some of your information unpaywalled?
If you can answer yes to these questions, then SEO is worth it for you.
How to approach SEO for Substack
If you want to use SEO for your Substack publication, here are three basic principles to keep in mind before you start:
Know why you are doing SEO. You’re doing it to help people who need your expertise and to get new eyes on your work.
Keep your eyes on the prize. Optimizing to show up in searches is only one part of the process; you also need to convert new visitors into subscribers.
Understand that SEO doesn’t have to be ‘done’ on every post. Not all posts have to perform well in searches. You only need a few high-performing posts to drive significant traffic to your publication.
Okay, now we’ve established the ground rules, let’s explore the techniques you can use to optimize your content.
How to show up in searches in 2025
In 2025, search engines use a range of highly sophisticated systems, including advanced AI like Google’s BERT and RankBrain, and complex algorithms to understand user queries and rank web pages.
The search engines are now so smart that there’s no need for creators to nerd out on every factor in the algorithms to create content that ranks well. There’s certainly no need for tricks like backlink farming.
This makes SEO simpler than it’s ever been. To rank well in searches, you simply have to create content that is high-quality, relevant, easy-to-read, and geographically contextualized. And make sure that search engines can recognize it as such.
High-quality content means content that is well-organized and well-written. Google’s update in August 2024 prioritized content that people find useful over content that appears to be created solely to perform well on search, including low-quality AI-written content (source).
High-quality content keeps readers on-page for a long time. Think about it: if you find a webpage with lots of information relevant to your search, you will stay longer. But if you land on a page with generic advice, you will click away in seconds.
Search engines know how long readers stay on a page. They recognize that pages with valuable content are viewed for longer and rank them higher in search results.
Relevant content is focused on a single topic and includes specific answers to common questions for that topic. In 2025, I’m noticing that posts that address many related questions on the same page do well.
Easy-to-read is another quality search engines value. It means simple language, lots of sub-headings, step-by-step guidance, numbered steps or bullet points, and short paragraphs. Using numbers in sub-headings, steps, and lists signals to the bots that your content is well-structured and organized.
The final part of the puzzle is making sure your content is geographically appropriate. That means if your information is specific to a certain place, the context is provided within the post.
For example, content about regional food, holidays, politics, or tourist destinations should mention the name of the region in the same post, so search engines can understand whether your content is relevant to an individual user.
How to optimize your Substack posts
First, remember that not all posts have to be optimized. If you’re sharing an update on your progress, telling a funny story, checking in with your community or announcing a new initiative, you don’t need to worry about SEO for that post.
However, if you are writing a post that contains information people might search for, that’s the time to optimize. You can go hardcore and design a post for SEO from the ground up. Or you can use SEO techniques to extend the reach of one of your normal posts.
I’ll share both options.
1. Hard-core optimization
To design a post for SEO from the ground up, follow this process:
Aim for a post that is long, informational, ultra-helpful and accessible to everyone (no paywalls).
Choose a topic you know people are curious about. Keep it relatively narrow so you can address it comprehensively without having to write an entire book.
Limit your post to a single topic: avoid extra sections or crosslinks to unrelated posts which might confuse the search engines.
Ask yourself what questions people might have about your topic.
Anticipate related questions, like the ones that AI tools typically suggest.
Create an outline for your post using these questions.
Phrase the questions as complete sentences, since this is how people search in 2025 (SEO nerds call this ‘long-tail keywords’).
Answer each question in turn using simple language. Use the topic name and related terms (‘keywords’) multiple times throughout the post.
Aim to tell readers what they think they need to know, and what they didn’t know they needed to know.
Go in-depth, provide specifics, add real-world examples and personal insights - focus on adding knowledge that an AI tool can’t easily replicate.
Add contrarian or unique perspectives, something that will make your content seem like an alternative point of view to AI tools. If you say the same thing as every other creator on the internet, there’s no reason for the bots to serve up your work.
Rename images using your keywords, and add alt-text containing keywords to images, if appropriate.
Use your main topic keywords in the title and URL of the post, and create Substack tags1 with keywords.
Write a plain-language SEO description2 for your post that includes keywords.
Be the first to write an in-depth article on a specific question, then update it every six months. Search engines value long-lasting posts that remain up-to-date.
Rinse and repeat for related topics - this will build your authority, so search engines recognise you as an expert. This aligns with Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness).
2. Low-key optimization
Not everyone wants to write like me and create encyclopedia entries for their Substack readers 😏. If your publication is less informational and more entertaining, you can still use SEO to get new visitors.
For example, if your publication is about amazing moments in baseball history, you won’t want to follow the hardcore steps I just described. (Although an occasional nerdish deep dive into a specific topic like ‘How scoring rules have changed over time’, and optimized using the steps above, might get you a few new fans every month.)
Low-key optimization works for uncommon searches.
If you write posts that contain answers to uncommon questions, you can low-key optimize like this:
Anticipate a query(s) a searcher might have.
Incorporate the answer(s) to that query(s) into your post, using plain language.
Create Substack tags with keywords related to those queries and attach them to the post.
Reference the query or answer in your post’s SEO description.
For example, a visitor to a small town might want to know the history of an unusual building, or know if the flower market is wheelchair friendly. A baseball nerd might want to know obscure details about a game played decades ago.
If your posts contain answers to such questions, you can anticipate those questions and address them more clearly in the body of your post.
In doing so, you’ll be helping people who need the answers you have - the exact people who will be super-excited to discover your publication!
SEO advice that Substack creators don’t need to follow
If you’re familiar with SEO techniques, you might notice there are a few elements I haven’t addressed so far.
Search engines don’t just love keywords and high-quality content; they also love
fast load times
fast scroll
responsive layouts.
But no need to worry. As a Substack creator, you’re sorted: the Substack platform handles all of that for you. Reminder: Responsive sites are sites that are easy to read and navigate on mobile and tablets as well as laptops. Substack posts and pages use responsive layouts by default.
Final thoughts
SEO is a great way to get your work in front of people who you can’t reach otherwise, and can be a powerful tool for growth.
People who find your publication through an active search are usually extra excited to sign up, since you’ve helped them at exactly the moment they had a burning question. Don’t forget to include subscribe calls to action and in-post context to encourage them to subscribe.
There are two approaches to SEO on Substack: one is to go full-on hardcore like I did in this post, with an information-packed post that’s optimized from top to bottom. The second approach is to go low-key, adding a few extra tweaks to ordinary posts to help them appear in uncommon search queries.
Both approaches are valid, and suitable for different styles of publication.
You can also mix the two approaches in one publication, creating an occasional post designed specifically for search engine traffic, but keeping other posts less informational - there’s no need to optimize every single thing you send to your subscribers.
Okay, that’s everything you need to know about SEO for Substack in 2025.
Now I want to know: Will you change your approach to SEO after reading this?
Ooo, and if you arrived here from a search, let us know in the comments - you can show other readers that this stuff really works!
Until next time,
Karen
Substack tags appear as metadata attached to your post. Humans can’t see them but search engines and AI-bots can. Tags may help search engines and AI tools understand what’s in your post. However, most of my high-performing posts don’t contain tags, so they are not a must-have.
Find the SEO description in post settings (click on the gear icon while in the post editing window). As with tags, SEO descriptions are a nice-to-have: many of my high-performing posts don’t have custom SEO descriptions, but still rank well in searches.
I had no idea there was an SEO description field in post settings-- thank you! Also: sounds very naive, but I've never thought to ask myself if going all-in on SEO for a particular post makes sense. I liked your low-key SEO option for posts that might be more entertainment-oriented than the-mighty-expert-will-now-answer-your-pressing-question-type post.
Super thorough and helpful-- thank you!
Thank you Karen. So much valuable info.