A newsletter and a blog do different jobs
Substack and the Rankwise blog both let you publish for free. Substack is built around email and paid subscriptions. The Rankwise blog is built around your website and search.
Substack is a newsletter platform. Each post can go to your subscribers by email, and readers can pay for a subscription. Substack's going-paid page says writers keep 90% of their revenue minus credit card fees. A custom domain is a one-time $50 fee, and it must be a subdomain such as www.yourdomain.com.
The Rankwise blog is a business blog. It can live at yourdomain.com/blog with no domain fee. It collects newsletter sign-ups but sends no emails, and it has no paid subscriptions. Every post comes with a sitemap entry, structured data, an llms.txt line and a Markdown copy, so search engines and AI assistants can read it.
In this comparison:
Custom domains on Substack
Substack support lists the steps. You pay the $50 fee, enter a domain such as www.yourdomain.com, and add a CNAME record that points to target.substack-custom-domains.com. If you want yourdomain.com to work too, you turn on root domain redirects and add an A record.
Substack says it requires a subdomain such as www. So if your company site already runs on www.yourdomain.com, the newsletter needs another hostname. Substack support also says the Cloudflare proxy must be off, so you cannot put a Worker in front of it.
The Rankwise blog fits next to your existing site. A Cloudflare Worker, Next.js middleware on Vercel or Nginx forwards only /blog to Rankwise. The rest of your site stays as it is.
Email and paid subscriptions
This is where Substack is the better tool. It sends each post by email, it handles paid subscriptions, and readers who use Substack can find your publication. Substack support notes that emails still come from an @substack.com address after you add a custom domain.
The Rankwise blog does less here. Every post ends with a newsletter sign-up form, and you export the confirmed readers as a CSV. It sends no newsletters and takes no payments. If your main goal is a paid newsletter, Substack does that job.
Search and AI answers
A business blog often exists to answer the questions buyers ask in Google and in AI assistants. For that job, the address and the format of each page matter.
On the Rankwise blog, each post lives at yourdomain.com/blog, so links to it point at your site. Each blog also has:
- llms.txt, which lists every post with a link to its Markdown copy.
- A Markdown copy of every post, at the post address plus .md.
- Plain HTML pages with no JavaScript, plus Article and FAQ structured data.
Rankwise can also write sourced articles for you. A free blog includes 3 AI-written posts. On a paid plan, Rankwise finds the questions your buyers ask AI and writes an article for each one.
Using both
You can run both channels. Publish the full article on your Rankwise blog. Then send a short version through Substack with a link to the post. Subscribers get the email, and the full post builds your own domain.
Sources
We checked every Substack 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.