Tools
Free tools, no signup.
Small tools that answer one question each, built out of the same engine that powers the Subshack extension. Nothing to install, nothing to create an account for.
The question the audit answers
Most advice about growing on Substack is about what you publish. The profile audit starts one step earlier: someone read a Note of yours, clicked your name, and landed on your profile. That page has a few seconds to say what you write about and why it is worth an email address. If it fails, nothing you publish afterwards gets the chance to work.
Paste any public Substack URL — yours, or one you want to learn from — and the audit reads that page the way a first-time visitor and a search engine read it, then returns a score out of 100 with each check explained and ordered by what to fix first. Custom domains work: most established publications redirect their .substack.com address to their own, and the tool follows the redirect.
What it scores, and how much each part weighs
Five categories, weighted the way they affect whether a visit turns into a subscriber. The score is deterministic — no AI decides the number, and anything the page does not let us measure is excluded from the total rather than counted as a failure.
| Category | Weight | What it looks at |
|---|---|---|
| Positioning and clarity | 35 | Name, profile image, tagline, and whether a stranger understands what you publish in five seconds. |
| Conversion | 25 | Whether the subscribe action is visible, whether there is a stated reason to subscribe, and what the About section says. |
| Brand and trust | 15 | The social preview image your links show when shared, and the external links that prove there is a person behind the page. |
| Activity and consistency | 15 | How recently you published an article and a Note — a profile that looks dormant loses subscribers it never hears about. |
| Discovery and SEO | 10 | Page title, meta description, Open Graph title and description, canonical URL: what search engines read. |
Each check scores the full weight when it passes, half when it is present but weak, and nothing when it is missing. The report tells you what was detected, why it matters, and what to change — not just a number.
Who this is for
- You are starting out and the profile has never been looked at as a landing page. This is the cheapest thing you can fix: it takes an afternoon and it works on every visit that follows.
- You get views but few subscribers. The audit separates what a visitor sees from what you assume they see — the two are rarely the same page.
- You want to learn from a publication you admire. Run the audit on theirs. It only reads public information, and the comparison is more instructive than any checklist.
Tools, guides, and the extension
A tool gives you a result about your own publication. A guide explains a method you apply yourself. The Chrome extension is the same engine brought to where you actually write — drafting Notes, answering replies, and reusing your own articles instead of starting from a blank box. Start with whichever matches what you need right now; none of them requires the others.
Questions
- Do I need to install the extension to use these tools?
- No. Every tool on this page runs on the web, in your browser, with nothing to install and no account to create. The extension is the same analysis brought to where you write — useful once you are editing a Note or a reply, unnecessary to get a report.
- Why is there only one tool?
- Because one tool that answers a question well is worth more than five that half-answer it. The profile audit exists because it is the question that came back most often: what, on my Substack profile, is costing me subscribers? Others will be added when they clear the same bar.
- What do these tools not do?
- They do not read anything behind a login: no subscriber list, no private stats, no email. They cannot tell you why a specific reader did not subscribe. They read what a first-time visitor and a search engine see on a public page, and tell you what that page is failing to say.
Want the same analysis while you are actually writing, plus drafting and replies? Get the Chrome extension. Prefer to read first? Start with the Substack growth guides.