Awesome Kristi. I am not super familiar with improving SEO and performance follow-ups, etc. Let's wait and see how the Search Console might open doors to me. Thank you! 🙌
I just read through this and saved it to do tomorrow since I’m trying to NOT work today LOLZ since I had a 6 day workweek. But I feel so excited to do this I just might have to do this while enjoying wine outside. 😬 🍷
I was so frustrated because the site verification option is not available on my settings. And, when I searched for an answer in Substack's support area, I was just told that the newsletters were all already indexed on all search engines.
I can tell that is not the case with mine as Google wasn't finding it at all.
Still having an issue with my sitemap, and I am wondering if it's because I have not enabled paid subscriptions or turned on Stripe for this Substack. (I have well over five posts.)
Were you able to get it to work? You shouldn’t have to enable paid subscriptions or Stripe to get your sitemap generated. The newsletters are indexed on search engines, but this is helpful if you want to have major insight into your data.
No, still no sitemap. I have heard from a few other people that they are no longer generating sitemaps for new sites. When I inquired, I received this reply from Substack's automated helpdesk:
"Substack doesn't automatically generate a sitemap for individual newsletters. Sitemaps are typically used for SEO purposes on websites to help search engines index the site's content. Since Substack is a newsletter platform, the focus is more on direct subscriber engagement rather than search engine indexing."
Great article…I’ll be sharing this with my community as this topic came up recently on a coaching call and I’ve been looking for a good reference to share with them
Awesome! Thank you so much. This was the first instructional guide that worked to get my property verified on GSC. But I have a question. I don't seem to have a sitemap despite publishing more than articles. Any workaround with this? Thank you!
Hi Bii! It looks like you still don't have a sitemap for your newsletter. I just received a tip that if you try adding feed or feed.xml into Google Search Console, it might work. If you're up for trying, could you let me know if it works for you? Thanks!
💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽yayyy! Both worked thank you! Your message came in some days after I’d rechecked the /xml extension and saw no sitemap still! But now 🥰 it works. My site finally has a sitemap 😊 However, I actually had noticed earlier in the week while setting up my GBP that some of my Substack posts were ranking for my branded search terms. And had decided to cut Substack some slack 😅 But your shared options delivered the cherry on top! Thank you so much 😁
I would keep checking to see if yours gets created at https://biisbotanica.substack.com/sitemap.xml, especially since your publication is still fairly new. Please let me know if/when it shows up!
Thank you Kristi! I will definitely keep you updated. I have gone through Harshini's posts and it conclusively helped me understand that Substack is being stingy with sitemaps for new publications. Thanks for the recommendation. 😊
Hi Kristi, thanks for these amazing guides. I have set up a Custom Domain on my Substack and submitted this new sitemap to GSC. Now after GSC has indexed my site again and am getting 'Crawled - currently not indexed' as an error on seemingly every page on my Substack. Any idea how to fix this? Thank you so much again.
You need to give it a few days and you should start seeing pages get indexed. The longer and more you publish, the faster Google will index your content. At the beginning, it may take some time, and if you find certain links aren't getting indexed, you can request that they do.
Thanks Kristi for such valuable instructions. You had me right up until adding my property in GSC. Then things went awry when trying to verify via DNS record. Was initially advised to access the source code of my home page to insert a .txt record (Google generated) for my DNS provider ... and the brick wall surfaced. Backtracked and tried other verification methods: all epic failures.
Have already set up my substack in my GA4 account, so can see some data there. GTM in place too. So would have thought GSC would be a seamless extension. Not so.
It sounds like you got through the first major hoops. For this last step, when you get to add the property, select the URL prefix option (not the domain/DNS verification). Then you want to copy the full URL of your Substack. If you’ve already got GA and GTM set up and you’ve added the code in your Substack settings, it should work immediately.
Thanks Kristi. Appreciate the prompt response. And I did try the URL prefix option; several times, as per your excellent instructions. But still to no avail. It’s a mystery, given how embedded my stack is with GA4.
That is such a generous offer. Thank you. I did engage the chatbot over the weekend too, after the series of failures, but no resolution. So it promised to connect me with an actual support agent, who is meant to reach out via email. Let me see if or how that goes, before I take you up on your offer.
Will DM you Kristi if it comes to that. Thanks again.
Thank you for this! I’m confused about what to write after clicking “site maps” and it says “add site map” and ask then has my url/enter site map url. Do I enter my url again there?
Super valuable Kristi. Fits perfectly to my latest posts about getting feature on Google. More and more people find me via Google and I was thinking of adding GSK. I'll bookmark this and come to it later.
Hi Kristi, your post prompted me to connect search console to my second publication, and I was surprised to hear you say you have to use tag manager.
That's incorrect (as of today, anyway). I was able to simply paste the Search Console html tag into the Google Site Verification field in publication settings.
When you paste the tag from search console, Substack automatically strips off all the extra html parts and leaves you with the raw code.
Worked first time for me today, and this publication is now connected to Search Console without having to use Tag Manager.
Awesome Kristi. I am not super familiar with improving SEO and performance follow-ups, etc. Let's wait and see how the Search Console might open doors to me. Thank you! 🙌
Ummmmm OMG!! Thank you SOOO MUCH!
I just read through this and saved it to do tomorrow since I’m trying to NOT work today LOLZ since I had a 6 day workweek. But I feel so excited to do this I just might have to do this while enjoying wine outside. 😬 🍷
Heck yeah!
Thank you so much for writing this!
I was so frustrated because the site verification option is not available on my settings. And, when I searched for an answer in Substack's support area, I was just told that the newsletters were all already indexed on all search engines.
I can tell that is not the case with mine as Google wasn't finding it at all.
Still having an issue with my sitemap, and I am wondering if it's because I have not enabled paid subscriptions or turned on Stripe for this Substack. (I have well over five posts.)
Were you able to get it to work? You shouldn’t have to enable paid subscriptions or Stripe to get your sitemap generated. The newsletters are indexed on search engines, but this is helpful if you want to have major insight into your data.
No, still no sitemap. I have heard from a few other people that they are no longer generating sitemaps for new sites. When I inquired, I received this reply from Substack's automated helpdesk:
"Substack doesn't automatically generate a sitemap for individual newsletters. Sitemaps are typically used for SEO purposes on websites to help search engines index the site's content. Since Substack is a newsletter platform, the focus is more on direct subscriber engagement rather than search engine indexing."
For those struggling with having no sitemap, adding /feed.xml to Google Search Console instead worked for me
Ooh, thank you for this tip. Out of curiosity, when did you start your newsletter? I've heard the newer ones are having trouble getting a sitemap.
I started mine in May 2025
Awesome!
Great article…I’ll be sharing this with my community as this topic came up recently on a coaching call and I’ve been looking for a good reference to share with them
So glad you found it helpful!
Thank you so much!
Thank you!
Awesome! Thank you so much. This was the first instructional guide that worked to get my property verified on GSC. But I have a question. I don't seem to have a sitemap despite publishing more than articles. Any workaround with this? Thank you!
Hi Bii! It looks like you still don't have a sitemap for your newsletter. I just received a tip that if you try adding feed or feed.xml into Google Search Console, it might work. If you're up for trying, could you let me know if it works for you? Thanks!
For your site, try adding https://biisbotanica.substack.com/feed or https://biisbotanica.substack.com/feed.xml in GSC and then verifying in Chrome.
💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽yayyy! Both worked thank you! Your message came in some days after I’d rechecked the /xml extension and saw no sitemap still! But now 🥰 it works. My site finally has a sitemap 😊 However, I actually had noticed earlier in the week while setting up my GBP that some of my Substack posts were ranking for my branded search terms. And had decided to cut Substack some slack 😅 But your shared options delivered the cherry on top! Thank you so much 😁
Hi, I'm so glad you found this helpful. It looks like Substack may have made a change and no longer automatically creates sitemaps. I found this post talking about it. https://harshiniwrites.substack.com/p/substack-stopped-giving-this-feature
I would keep checking to see if yours gets created at https://biisbotanica.substack.com/sitemap.xml, especially since your publication is still fairly new. Please let me know if/when it shows up!
Thank you Kristi! I will definitely keep you updated. I have gone through Harshini's posts and it conclusively helped me understand that Substack is being stingy with sitemaps for new publications. Thanks for the recommendation. 😊
Thank you, Kristi! Found this via Google and it was easier than expected. Appreciate the step-by-step instructions.
Glad it helped!
Hi Kristi, thanks for these amazing guides. I have set up a Custom Domain on my Substack and submitted this new sitemap to GSC. Now after GSC has indexed my site again and am getting 'Crawled - currently not indexed' as an error on seemingly every page on my Substack. Any idea how to fix this? Thank you so much again.
Hey Matthew,
You need to give it a few days and you should start seeing pages get indexed. The longer and more you publish, the faster Google will index your content. At the beginning, it may take some time, and if you find certain links aren't getting indexed, you can request that they do.
Hope this helps!
Kristi
I'm pretty clueless about all of this, but this was so straightforward. Thank you.
Glad you found it helpful!
Thanks Kristi for such valuable instructions. You had me right up until adding my property in GSC. Then things went awry when trying to verify via DNS record. Was initially advised to access the source code of my home page to insert a .txt record (Google generated) for my DNS provider ... and the brick wall surfaced. Backtracked and tried other verification methods: all epic failures.
Have already set up my substack in my GA4 account, so can see some data there. GTM in place too. So would have thought GSC would be a seamless extension. Not so.
I shall try again tomorrow.
Hey Grant,
It sounds like you got through the first major hoops. For this last step, when you get to add the property, select the URL prefix option (not the domain/DNS verification). Then you want to copy the full URL of your Substack. If you’ve already got GA and GTM set up and you’ve added the code in your Substack settings, it should work immediately.
Let me know if it doesn’t work.
Thanks Kristi. Appreciate the prompt response. And I did try the URL prefix option; several times, as per your excellent instructions. But still to no avail. It’s a mystery, given how embedded my stack is with GA4.
If you’re open to it, I could hop on zoom and troubleshoot with you soon.
That is such a generous offer. Thank you. I did engage the chatbot over the weekend too, after the series of failures, but no resolution. So it promised to connect me with an actual support agent, who is meant to reach out via email. Let me see if or how that goes, before I take you up on your offer.
Will DM you Kristi if it comes to that. Thanks again.
Thank you for this! I’m confused about what to write after clicking “site maps” and it says “add site map” and ask then has my url/enter site map url. Do I enter my url again there?
Super valuable Kristi. Fits perfectly to my latest posts about getting feature on Google. More and more people find me via Google and I was thinking of adding GSK. I'll bookmark this and come to it later.
Thanks for letting me know, Kristina. I'm glad to hear you're getting more readers from Google!
Hi Kristi, your post prompted me to connect search console to my second publication, and I was surprised to hear you say you have to use tag manager.
That's incorrect (as of today, anyway). I was able to simply paste the Search Console html tag into the Google Site Verification field in publication settings.
When you paste the tag from search console, Substack automatically strips off all the extra html parts and leaves you with the raw code.
Worked first time for me today, and this publication is now connected to Search Console without having to use Tag Manager.
Some people don’t have that field. My old newsletter does. This one doesn’t. It just depends on what is available to you.
Oh wow that's weird. And annoying. Thanks for letting me know.
You're welcome.