Your Substack Disappeared from Google. Now What?
A core update and the on-page stuff that's still in your hands.
So someone on Reddit posted this week — panicked, understandably — that their Substack newsletter dropped from the top of page one on Google to somewhere in the abyss. Overnight. No warning. They hadn’t changed anything. They write regularly, add links, do the things you’re supposed to do. And still: gone.
I jumped in with an answer, and another commenter named Mike nailed something important too. But the conversation got me thinking about what Substack writers can actually do about this — because the honest answer is both “not much” and “more than you think.”
The short version of what happened
Google just released another core update. They do this periodically, and every time they do, rankings shuffle. Sometimes dramatically. If you keep up with SEO news at all, sites like Search Engine Roundtable have been tracking the volatility, and Google’s own blog confirmed the update.
Here’s the thing: it’s not just you. It’s everybody.
Mike made a point in the thread that I think is worth repeating. Search engine technology has changed more in the last six months than in the previous ten years. Google has actual competition now — Perplexity, ChatGPT, xAI — and they’re iterating fast to keep up. That means ranking volatility is the new normal. Get comfortable with uncomfortable, because this isn’t settling down anytime soon.
If you didn’t make any radical changes to your content, there’s a good chance this is Google’s doing, not yours.
What you can’t do on Substack
Before I get into what you can do, let’s talk about what you can’t — because this is the frustrating part.
Substack doesn’t let you add Google Search Console. They don’t let you add Google Tag Manager. So you can’t see how Google actually views your subdomain — what’s indexed, what’s crawled, what errors exist, what search queries you’re showing up for. You get Google Analytics, and that’s it. Analytics tells you about traffic. It tells you nothing about indexation.
You can search your subdomain on Google directly (site:yourname.substack.com) and get a few clues, but it’s not super reliable. You’re flying partly blind.
What you can do — on-page stuff that matters
There’s still a lot within your control on every post you publish. These are the basics, and they work.
Use your heading tags. H1, H2, H3. Think of them as an outline — they structure what your document is about. Search engines and AI both pay attention to that hierarchy. If your post is a wall of text with no headings, you’re making it harder for everyone: readers, crawlers, and the AI tools that are increasingly how people find content.
Add alt text to your images. When you upload an image on Substack, there’s a field for alt text. Use it. Alt text is meant to describe what the image actually is. Don’t stuff it with keywords — just describe it naturally, and your keywords will show up on their own.
Test your links. Click them. Make sure they go where you expect. Broken links are a bad signal, and they’re easy to miss, especially in older posts.
Use lists. Bulleted or numbered, whichever fits. Lists are easy to scan for readers and search engines love them too. If you’re explaining steps or options, a list is almost always better than burying them in a paragraph.
The table of contents question
Something the jury is still out on: those table of contents blocks with jump links at the top of a post. There’s a study that just came out suggesting they might actually be detrimental to search performance. I’ll link it here.
I think this is worth testing. One of my client sites added table of contents widgets to some of their blog content last year, and now I’m curious whether it’s impacting those pages. Something for me to dig into. If you’re using them on Substack, maybe keep an eye on whether your posts with TOCs perform differently than the ones without.
The custom domain workaround for Search Console
This one’s for the people who want more data.
If you’re on a Substack subdomain (yourname.substack.com), you really don’t have options for getting Search Console access. Substack doesn’t make it available, and there’s no way around it.
But if you’re willing to pay the $50 for a custom domain on Substack, a door opens — a small one, but it’s there.
Here’s the setup: when you use a custom domain on Substack with Cloudflare, the domain configuration has to be set to “DNS only” — the gray cloud icon, not the orange proxied one. That means Cloudflare is functioning purely as a nameserver. Traffic goes straight from the visitor to Substack’s servers. No Workers, no Transform Rules, no header injection. Nothing. It’s just resolving a domain name to an IP address.
So no, you can’t use Cloudflare to inject a Google Search Console verification meta tag into the head of your pages.
But — you can use DNS-based verification. Google Search Console offers a TXT record method. You add a TXT record in Cloudflare (which works fine even in DNS-only mode, since TXT records are pure DNS), and Google verifies ownership that way. No need to touch the HTML.
I haven’t done this yet myself, but I’m seriously thinking about it. Having actual Search Console data for a Substack would change the game in terms of understanding what’s happening with your content in search.
The bigger picture
The world of SEO has always been fast-changing. It’s just faster now. Google’s not the only game in town anymore, and they know it, and they’re reacting. That’s going to keep shaking things up for everyone — Substack writers included.
You can’t control Google’s algorithm. You can control what’s on your pages. Start there.
If you’re a business owner staring at your website wondering why things aren’t working the way they should — or you just want someone who gets this stuff to take a look — I have a few openings for new clients. Get in touch.
Stay Curious,
Lisa
Curator of Unhidden and your missing search rankings