In our searches, a copy that pointed home never beat its original. Two copies that both claimed to be the original fought it out, and the repost won.
This fall we’re publishing long-form in three places: Substack, Medium and Blogger. Before we split the work, I wanted to see how writers who already do this well divide theirs, and what Google does when the same essay lives in two places.
So on Sunday, September 27, 2026, we studied eight writers who have published on at least two of Substack, Medium and their own website. Five of them write about B2B marketing or growth. We pulled their recent post lists and read the tag on each copy that tells Google which version is the original. Then we ran eight Google searches on the topics they’re known for.
The findings first.
Seven of the eight now publish their long-form on Substack. Four run it on their own domain.
Seven of the eight have posted nothing on Medium since December 2024 or earlier. The one writer still active there posts the same essay on the day it goes up on Substack, and points Google to Substack.
In our searches, a copy that pointed home never outranked the original.
Two copies that each called themselves the original competed, and the repost took first place.
A Substack on the writer’s own domain took first place for broad searches too, including a startup question where Harvard and Y Combinator also rank.
No AI answer we checked cited a Medium copy.
The eight writers
Each one has published on at least two of the three places, and each is known for a topic we could search.
Lenny Rachitsky, product and growth: lennysnewsletter.com
Emily Kramer, B2B marketing: newsletter.mkt1.co
Julie Zhuo, product and management: lg.substack.com and Medium
Tim Denning, writing and the creator business: timdenning.substack.com, timdenning.com and Medium
Gergely Orosz, software engineering: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com and blog.pragmaticengineer.com
Andrew Chen, growth: andrewchen.substack.com, andrewchen.com and Medium
Casey Winters, growth: caseyaccidental.com and Medium
Ross Simmonds, B2B content marketing: rosssimmonds.com, foundationinc.co and Medium
We read public pages only. Paid posts count toward how often someone publishes, but we didn’t read what’s behind the paywall.
Substack is where the long-form lives now
Seven of the eight publish their long-form on Substack. Ross Simmonds is the exception: he writes on his own site, about two and a half posts a month since June, and on his agency’s blog.
Four of the seven run Substack on a domain they own:
Lenny Rachitsky on lennysnewsletter.com.
Casey Winters on caseyaccidental.com, the address his old blog used.
Gergely Orosz on newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com.
Emily Kramer on newsletter.mkt1.co, a subdomain of her company’s site.
Two writers moved there from sites they built themselves:
Andrew Chen’s last post on andrewchen.com is dated February 26, 2024. His homepage says “I have moved to Substack” and that the old site stays “up for posterity.”
Tim Denning’s own site and his Medium page both stopped on December 9, 2024. Over the last six months he published about eight Substack posts a month.
Our read: the writers went where the subscriber list lives. A Substack reader is an email address the writer keeps. On Medium, the relationship mostly stays with Medium.
Tim Denning put the platform question well in a Substack note on January 14, 2024: “All the platforms work if you work.” Then he picked one and worked it eight times a month.
Long pieces, on a schedule
The typical post is long. These are the median lengths of the posts we read, and how often each writer published over the last six months:
Emily Kramer: about 5,000 words, 2.8 posts a month
Gergely Orosz: about 4,000 words, 10.7 posts a month
Lenny Rachitsky: about 3,300 words, 3.5 posts a month
Tim Denning: about 2,200 words, 8 posts a month
Andrew Chen: about 1,900 words, about 1 post a month (over two years)
Julie Zhuo: about 1,800 words, 1.7 posts a month
Casey Winters: about 700 words, 1 post in six months
Ross Simmonds is missing from the list because his site’s feed carries summaries, not full posts.
Four of the seven go past 2,000 words. The pace varies widely: Gergely Orosz publishes about every three days, and Andrew Chen about once a month over two years.
Medium went quiet, except as a mirror
Seven of the eight have stopped posting on Medium. Their last Medium posts:
Gergely Orosz: December 2015
Casey Winters: March 2018
Andrew Chen: December 2018
Ross Simmonds: December 2019
Lenny Rachitsky: February 2020
Emily Kramer: September 2020
Tim Denning: December 2024
Julie Zhuo is the exception, and she uses Medium in a specific way. Each of her last 10 Medium posts is an essay she published on Substack the same day. Some Medium versions run shorter: one was 1,858 words on Medium against 2,607 on Substack.
All four Medium copies we opened tell Google the Substack post is the original. For example, her Medium post on personal AI names the Substack post as its canonical. That’s the tag a page uses to say “the real version lives over there.” On Medium, it’s a setting under Advanced Settings: “This story was originally published elsewhere.”
A copy that points home doesn’t compete
This is the finding I was most curious about. We searched Google for a signature piece from three writers whose Medium copies point home.
Julie Zhuo. We searched the title of her April essay on spotting great designers, plus her name. First place was her Substack post. The Medium copy wasn’t in the top eight results.
Tim Denning. We searched “tim denning 6-figure newsletter writer rules more subscribers”. First place was the post on timdenning.com. His Medium copy names that page as its canonical, and it wasn’t in the top eight.
Casey Winters. We searched “product visionary vs product leader casey winters”. First place was the post on caseyaccidental.com. His 2018 Medium copy says it was originally published on his blog, and its canonical names his old blog address. That address now forwards to the Substack post, and Google followed it. The Medium copy wasn’t in the top eight.
Three for three: the original ranked first, and the copy stayed out of the way.
Two originals compete, and the copy can win
Gergely Orosz runs his news roundup, The Pulse, in two places. It goes out on Substack first, and a version appears on his blog about a week later. Both pages tell Google they are the original.
We searched “the pulse tech companies move to open AI models pragmatic engineer”. First place was the blog copy, posted September 10. The Substack original, posted September 3, came second.
Google doesn’t give points for showing up first.
For Gergely this is probably fine. Both pages are his, and a reader lands on one of them either way. For a company whose website pays the bills, it matters more. If the same article sits on your site and on Substack, and both claim to be the original, Google decides which one gets the visit. It may not be the one you’d choose.
Your own domain can win broad searches
Two results show how far a Substack on your own domain can reach.
Lenny Rachitsky. We searched “how to know if you have product market fit”, a broad question where pages from Harvard, Y Combinator and Salesforce also rank. First place was his Substack post, on his own domain.
Emily Kramer. We searched “B2B startup marketing field guide”, close to her own title and exactly what a new marketing lead might type. First and third place were part 1 and part 2 of her MKT1 field guide, on newsletter.mkt1.co.
Andrew Chen’s old site still works for him too. We searched “cold start problem network effects”. First place was a PDF titled The Cold Start Problem, hosted on andrewchen.com, two and a half years after his last post there. An archive keeps earning.
One more thing we noticed: Google showed an AI Overview above the results on six of our eight searches. On those, the first blue link sits below it.
Which copy the AI answers cite
We also asked the same eight questions of Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity and ChatGPT, logged out, between 2:20 and 2:32 PM Pacific on September 27. Each tool ran once, and we read its own list of sources. Perplexity answered the first four questions, then asked us to sign up, so it has four answers, not eight.
No answer cited a Medium copy. When these writers were cited, it was their Substack, their own site or, once, a LinkedIn article.
The repost won the AI answers too. For Gergely Orosz’s Pulse issue, Google’s AI Overview and Perplexity both cited the blog copy, not the Substack original.
First place isn’t a guaranteed citation. Emily Kramer’s field guide ranks first on Google, but the AI Overview left her out. ChatGPT cited her newsletter and recommended the guide by name.
Some first-place posts were cited. The AI Overview cited Lenny Rachitsky’s post, the same one that ranks first. Julie Zhuo’s Substack was cited by the AI Overview and by Perplexity.
These answers change from one load to the next. One AI Overview changed between two loads a minute apart. Treat this as a snapshot, not a rate.
What Google says about copies
Google’s own documentation says this directly.
It doesn’t recommend the canonical tag when partners republish your articles, because their pages are often very different from yours. Its most effective fix, it says, is for those partners to “block indexing of your content.” (Google Search Central, updated August 21, 2026)
It also says a canonical is “a hint, not a rule.” Google may pick a different page than you do. (Google Search Central, updated August 20, 2026)
The three platforms don’t give you the same controls:
Medium lets you point a story’s canonical at the original (Medium Help).
Blogger lets you keep a single post out of search with a noindex tag (Blogger Help).
On Substack we found no setting for either.
Our read: the writers who kept their Medium copies from competing did it with the canonical setting, and our searches agree with them. Google’s own advice is stricter, and the simplest path is to never make the second copy at all.
If you publish in more than one place
If you publish in more than one place, this is how we’d set it up:
Pick one home for the original. Your own domain is best, whether that’s your site or a Substack on a subdomain like newsletter.yourcompany.com. Five of our eight writers do exactly that.
If you mirror a piece to Medium, set the canonical. It’s one setting, under Advanced Settings. Three writers did it, and all three originals ranked first in our searches.
Never run two copies that both claim to be the original. Google will pick one, and in our test it picked the repost.
Keep old addresses alive. Casey Winters’ 2018 Medium copy still points to a blog address from years ago, and that address still forwards to the right post. Andrew Chen’s archive still ranks first for the topic his book is named after.
Plan for long pieces. In this group, four of the seven go past 2,000 words, and the two most frequent writers publish every three or four days. That’s the bar we’re setting for our own.
What we’re doing with it
This is how we’re setting up our own three places:
Every piece is written for one platform and published once. Nothing is copied from miningwells.com, and nothing goes up twice.
This Substack is the flagship. Expect data studies like this one, written for founders of tech companies, startups and consumer brands, at 2,000 to 3,000 words.
Medium gets essays on persuasion and writing that sounds human. They draw on research we’ve already checked at the source.
Blogger gets data briefs built from public records, each with its method and a table.
If a piece ever has to live in two places, the original stays on our site. A Medium copy points its canonical home, and a Blogger copy gets noindex. Substack never carries a copy.
The limits
This is eight writers and eight searches on one day, in US English. Google’s results change by place and by week, and a different search for the same topic can rank a different page. We read public pages only. Treat this as a field note, not a law. We’ll run the searches again in a few months and tell you what moved.
If you want a second look
If you publish in more than one place and aren’t sure which copy Google shows, leave both links in the comments and we’ll take a look.
At Mining Wells Marketing Agency, you will never be passed to a salesperson, an account manager or a junior marketer fresh out of college. Senior operators work on every account, start to finish. If you want help deciding where your company’s writing should live, write to us at https://miningwells.com/services/content-marketing-agency.
How we measured
Post lists: each writer’s Substack archive, Medium feed and site feed, read on September 27, 2026. “Typical length” is the median word count of the posts we read. “Posts a month” covers the last six months.
Canonical tags: read from each page’s code.
Google: eight searches on September 27, 2026, in US English. We recorded the top eight organic results for each.
AI answers: the same eight questions in Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity (the first four only), logged out, one run each, between 2:20 and 2:32 PM Pacific.
Sources
Google Search Central, “Fix canonicalization issues,” syndicated content, updated August 21, 2026: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/canonicalization-troubleshooting
Google Search Central, “What is URL canonicalization,” updated August 20, 2026: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/canonicalization
Medium Help, “Set a canonical link”: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033930293
Blogger Help, custom robots tags: https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/41373
Tim Denning, Substack note, January 14, 2024
Every writer page and search result is linked where we mention it above.
Jessica Wells is co-founder of Mining Wells Marketing Agency (miningwells.com), which works with businesses nationwide.