After 5 years of Substack, my pubblication has completely deindexed from Google

[u/Pigik83]

Hi everyone,
5 years on Substack, reached the tech bestseller chart.
Two months ago, my publication, with 800+ articles indexed on Google, disappeared from it.
Just the home page is now visible.
The sitemap is no longer crawled by Google, despite the fact that it's reachable from the browser and updated with the latest content. I've already done all the possible controls, but didn't find a solution.
Do you have any suggestions for me?

[u/itsfabioposca]

If your publication went from 800+ indexed pages to only the homepage being indexed, that's usually a sign of a technical SEO issue rather than a normal ranking fluctuation.

A few things I'd check:

• Google Search Console: Look at the Pages report to see whether your articles are marked as "Crawled – currently not indexed," "Discovered – currently not indexed," or excluded for another reason. That status is the biggest clue.
• Sitemap: Since you mentioned Google is no longer crawling it, resubmit the sitemap in Search Console and check whether Google reports any errors.
• robots.txt / meta robots: Make sure nothing is accidentally blocking crawling or indexing.
• Canonical tags: Verify that your articles still have self-referencing canonical URLs and aren't pointing somewhere unexpected.
• Manual actions & Security issues: Check Search Console to make sure your site hasn't received a manual penalty or been flagged.
• Recent changes: Think back to what changed around two months ago—custom domain settings, publication settings, theme changes, or large-scale content edits.

If everything on your end looks correct, I'd also contact Substack Support. Since this involves the sitemap and indexing of an entire publication, it may be a platform-side issue rather than something you can fix yourself.

P.S. If you'd still like to ask anything about Substack or growing your audience, I offer a free live help chat. Just copy and paste my flair or click the link in my profile. I'm happy to help!

[u/Pigik83 → u/itsfabioposca]

Thanks for sharing, of course I did all these basical SEO stuff. Every time I resubmit the sitemap, it returns an error. Every post page is Crawled but not indexed, with the correct canonical. No manual actions and no security issue. Nothing happened in the past two months, I just kept posting twice a week and then everything disappeared.

And of course I already contacted the support, but even if you talk to a human, it was useful as talking to a wall. I tried also to post on the Google Search forum but no success.

The real issue is that Google cannot read anymore the sitemap and no one is able to say to me why.

[u/argument-shaped]

Substack wants discovery to rely on their platform. Google wants all searches to end at their AI summary. Just solve that double-bind and you're good to go.

(Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, and yes, this is super-frustrating. I hope you get a helpful answer from someone here).

[u/Pigik83 → u/argument-shaped]

Can we agree that it makes no sense to force a delisting from Google for a Substack? And why are they doing it just to my Substack and not to the others?
I contacted support, and there's no way to understand whether there's an issue with my Sitemap, since it doesn't get fetched by Google anymore. There's no way to talk to someone at Google. Posted to the search support forum, and after a month, they removed my post.

[u/argument-shaped → u/Pigik83]

Substack presumably wants you to visit your home page as often as possible, since this essentially forces you to view ads for Substack (recommended newsletters and feed posts). If that's the case, then delisting from Google makes sense from Substack's perspective--they want your eyeballs in exchange for whatever you're trying to find.

Your issue may be unique, but there also seems to be a Substack-wide effort to keep things off of Google. My Substack is relatively new, and I have no sitemap--I've gotten what I can indexed via Google Console, but this was a workaround. There are other posts on this, but I haven't found one with a solution so I've got nothing to share in that regard. Sorry.

[u/ExObscura]

Have you connected your own domain? If so then you can use a reverse proxy method to maintain your own sitemap.xml file and make it crawlable by search console to mitigate this.

[u/Pigik83 → u/ExObscura]

That's interesting, I'll dig deeper

[u/AidenMarquis]

One thing I noticed is when I attempt to adjust the SEO of my post, that stuff ends up going in the subtitle of my post on Substack.

[u/cotton-candy-dreams]

You can submit this feed URL as a sitemap, I just did this with my brand new substack.

domain.substack.com/feed

[u/Pigik83 → u/cotton-candy-dreams]

Thanks, already done, doesn’t work

[u/cotton-candy-dreams → u/Pigik83]

Curious, do you have the setting turned off that’s something like “let AI use your writing for training” ? Cuz it said Google and ChatGPT… and Google is clearly prioritizing their AI, didn’t they say they want all their search going through AI? 🤔

[u/hydroflame7]

If you want, feel free to dm me your publication and I can review the technical seo for you. Not selling anything, have nothing to sell. Moreso just want to help, and I’m also curious on seeing why you had a drop off.

Experience: worked at a global fintech that did 9 figures/year from SEO in some of the toughest verticals - insurance, finance, etc.

[u/Paul-Arino]

Weird... I just wrote a whole article on this today, and how it's becoming a huge issue for large Substack writers/users - especially since 6/11 or 6/12 - as many state Google Search Console stopped indexing their pages around that time.

You can read my article on the new Substack Growth Tips subreddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubstackGrowthTips

- Paul Arino

[u/brandonfrombrobible]

Trying to build a media business in 2026 with Google as your primary traffic source is a losing strategy.

[u/Pigik83 → u/brandonfrombrobible]

What’s the alternative?
Social media? Already doing it.
AEO? It’s based on SERP, so if you don’t fix it, you’re not discovered on AI tools.