How Substack's Discover Page Affects Notes Visibility

Published: September 2026

This is one of the more common points of confusion for writers new to Notes: assuming that showing up on Substack's Discover page and showing up in the Notes feed are the same problem, solved the same way. They aren't. Discover is a posts-and-publications mechanism built on categories and leaderboards; Notes visibility runs on an entirely separate system. Understanding where the line sits saves you from optimizing for the wrong thing.

What Discover actually is

Substack's discovery network is a bundle of features distinct from the Notes feed: cross-publication recommendations, category leaderboards, an explore page, personalized search, and topic-specific pages (some tied to specific subjects like AI, NBA, or Bitcoin). Every publication can choose two category tags to be categorized under - Culture, Technology, Business, Health & Wellness, and dozens of others - and if your publication makes it onto a leaderboard, it appears under your first chosen category specifically. This entire system is organized around publications and posts, not individual Notes.

How posts actually land on these leaderboards

The mechanic behind the "top posts" leaderboards is specific and somewhat different from what many writers assume: posts get featured there largely based on how many of your own readers click the like button, not on some external popularity contest. Separately, algorithmically-placed discovery topic pages work differently still - you don't choose to appear on a topic page the way you choose a category tag; the system places your content there based on what it's actually about, with no manual opt-in and no traditional leaderboard structure. Categories matter most for the browse-style experience of someone scrolling Discover looking for something in a subject area; personalized recommendations elsewhere on the platform lean more on individual reader behavior and the content of specific posts.

Why none of this touches Notes

Here's the key point worth being explicit about: nothing in the Discover/category/leaderboard system described above governs where or whether your Notes get shown. Notes visibility runs entirely on the separate Notes feed algorithm, which Substack's own team has described as optimizing specifically for converting readers into subscribers - a different objective, a different feed, and a different set of inputs than the category-and-leaderboard system that powers Discover. A publication with excellent category positioning and a strong Discover presence can still have Notes that go nowhere, and a publication that's never been featured on any leaderboard can still have Notes doing real distribution work through restacks and audience-overlap signals. The two systems don't feed into each other in any direct way.

What this means for where you spend your effort

If your actual goal is growing through Notes specifically, spending time trying to reverse-engineer Discover category placement or chase a leaderboard spot is largely wasted effort - it's solving a problem that doesn't touch the channel you're trying to grow. The levers that do move Notes visibility sit somewhere else entirely: posting patterns and consistency, genuine restacking behavior with audience-aligned writers, and being deliberately positioned enough that other writers can recommend you. None of that requires category tags or leaderboard rank.

Where Discover still matters - just for a different goal

None of this means categories and Discover are worthless - they're simply solving a different problem, one worth pursuing for its own sake. A well-chosen category tag and a publication that occasionally lands on a top-posts leaderboard genuinely helps new readers browsing by topic find your posts, which is valuable for the same reason any indexable, permanent content is valuable - it's a slow-building, compounding discovery channel that keeps working long after a specific post was published. It's just not the lever for Notes, and treating it as one means misallocating effort that would do more for you inside the Notes feed itself.

The bottom line

Discover and the Notes feed are two separate discovery systems on the same platform, optimizing for different goals with different inputs. Category tags and leaderboards are worth setting up correctly for your posts, but they have no bearing on whether your Notes get seen - that's governed entirely by the Notes-specific algorithm, restacks, and recommendation mechanics covered elsewhere on this blog. Knowing which system you're actually trying to influence is the first step to not wasting effort on the wrong one.

NotesIQ focuses on the metrics that actually move Notes visibility - restacks, replies, and engagement patterns - not vanity signals borrowed from a different part of the platform.