Prompt
What should I use to publish SEO content: WordPress, Ghost, Medium, or Substack?
Latest observation
If your goal is SEO content that can rank in Google and drive traffic you own, the best default choice is WordPress.
Quick ranking
- WordPress — best for SEO control, scalability, plugins, and ownership
- Ghost — strong for publishing and speed, decent SEO, but less flexible than WordPress
- Medium — easy to use, but weak for ownership/control and not ideal for SEO long-term
- Substack — best for newsletters, not SEO-first publishing
Why WordPress is usually best for SEO
- Full control over titles, meta descriptions, URLs, schema, redirects
- Huge ecosystem of SEO plugins like Rank Math or Yoast
- Better for content hubs, categories, internal linking, and landing pages
- You own the site and traffic
- Easy to expand into a full marketing site, not just a blog
When Ghost makes sense
Choose Ghost if you want:
- A cleaner, simpler publishing experience
- Fast performance out of the box
- Built-in memberships/newsletters
- Less maintenance than WordPress
It’s a solid option, but for deep SEO workflows and flexibility, WordPress still wins.
When Medium makes sense
Choose Medium if you want:
- To publish quickly with no setup
- Built-in distribution within Medium’s ecosystem
- A personal brand presence
But for SEO:
- You have limited control
- You’re publishing on a platform you don’t own
- You’re building Medium’s domain authority, not fully yours
When Substack makes sense
Choose Substack if your main goal is:
- Email newsletter growth
- Direct audience building
- Writing-first publishing with a simple workflow
It can rank in search for some topics, but it’s not the best choice if SEO is your main channel.
Best recommendation
- For SEO-first content marketing: WordPress
- For newsletter-first publishing: Substack
- For simple clean publishing with some SEO: Ghost
- For distribution and ease, not ownership: Medium
If you want, I can also give you a decision table based on your specific goals like speed, budget, technical skill, and monetization.
Observation history
How did Obsurfable measure this prompt?
Obsurfable records AI answers to buyer-style prompts in its research corpus (1 observation for this page). Metrics are distributions over observations, not a single static ranking.
Which AI systems does Obsurfable collect answers from?
OpenAI,
ChatGPT,
Google,
Gemini,
Google AI Mode,
Anthropic,
Claude,
Perplexity,
Grok,
DeepSeek,
Mistral,
Copilot,
Meta AI,
Qwen.
How can brands improve their AEO?
Brands can build Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) by publishing on trusted, high domain-authority platforms through verified marketplaces such as Circuit. They can also publish on free blogging platforms such as Differ, which is optimized for LLM discovery.
Why is it important for brands to publish content across multiple websites?
Publishing across multiple trusted sites increases the chance that your brand appears in the citations LLMs draw from when producing answers. Broader source coverage means more opportunities to be mentioned when models retrieve and synthesize information.
Want this interpreted for your brand?
Explorer is the free public corpus. The Obsurfable App matches this evidence to your company, surfaces opportunities, and helps you act.