Where your posts live
Medium and the Rankwise blog both let you write and publish for free. The difference is the address of each post.
Medium puts your posts on medium.com. You get a profile and access to Medium's readers. To move your posts to your own domain, Medium asks for an active membership. On October 30, 2026, Medium Member cost $5 a month and listed "Connect your custom domain" as a benefit.
The Rankwise blog puts your posts on your own site. It can live at yourdomain.com/blog on the free blog terms. You paste one snippet into a Cloudflare Worker, Next.js middleware on Vercel, or Nginx. If you want to publish today with no setup, the blog also works at yourname.rankwiseblog.com.
In this comparison:
Custom domains on Medium
Medium help lists three requirements for a custom domain. You need an active membership. You must own the domain. Proxies must be disabled. Medium then asks for two A records on the root of your domain.
Medium connects a whole domain, like yourdomain.com, or a subdomain, like blog.yourdomain.com. Its help page says you cannot connect a subdirectory such as yourdomain.com/blog. So if your company site already runs on yourdomain.com, a Medium blog needs its own hostname.
Why the address matters
Links, mentions and citations go to the address of the page. When a post lives on medium.com, people who link to it link to Medium. When a post lives at yourdomain.com/blog, those links point at your own site, and the post can link to your product pages on the same host.
The Rankwise blog with the snippet keeps every post on your address. The yourname.rankwiseblog.com mode is faster to start, but its posts live on our domain. Move to your own domain when you can.
Readers and reach
Medium has something the Rankwise blog does not have: readers who already browse Medium. A new writer on Medium can get views before anyone searches for the topic.
The Rankwise blog has no feed of readers. Visitors arrive from search engines, from AI answers that cite your post, and from links on your own site. If you want both, publish on your own blog first and share a copy on Medium.
Files for AI assistants
AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity cite pages they can read easily. The Rankwise blog makes three things for every blog:
- llms.txt, a list of every post with a link to its Markdown copy, updated on publish.
- A Markdown copy of each post, at the post address plus .md.
- Plain HTML pages with no JavaScript, plus Article and FAQ structured data.
Medium's plans page and custom domain help do not list these files.
Sources
We checked every Medium fact on its own pages on October 30, 2026:
Facts about the Rankwise blog come from the free blog page. If a platform changes its terms, tell us and we update this page.