# 08 · Substack to Website

Every new letter is pulled from Substack with its images, rebuilt as a page on your own website, given schema
markup and Open Graph tags, and a plain-text version for AI crawlers. It is added to your letters index, and
the deploy takes about 30 seconds.

**For your AI:** walk me through building this one step at a time. Ask how my website is built and where it is
hosted first. Don't move on until the current step works.

## First, check

- Do you publish on Substack (or another newsletter platform) and want the letters on a site you own?
- Do you copy letters to your site by hand today, or not at all?

## What you need

- A website you control in code (for example Astro or Next.js) on a host that deploys from git (Vercel, Netlify).
- Your Substack's public feed or export.
- Claude Code or another AI that can edit your site's files and run commands.

## Where it runs

The import runs on your computer. The pages go live when you push to git.

## The steps

1. **Pull the letter.** From your Substack feed: title, subtitle, date, body and images.
2. **Keep the images.** Download them into your site so the page never depends on Substack.
3. **Rebuild the page.** In your site's own design, with clean headings, links that still work, and the
   original date.
4. **Schema and Open Graph.** Article schema with you as the author, and the title, description and picture
   that show when the link is shared.
5. **A plain-text version.** The same letter as plain text or Markdown, so AI crawlers can read it easily.
6. **The index.** Add it to your letters page and your sitemap.
7. **Deploy.** Push to git, check the live page, and ping search engines (IndexNow) that it exists.

## Checklist before you rely on it

- [ ] The page says it was first published on Substack, with a link back (canonical), if you want Substack
      to keep the search credit.
- [ ] Every image loads from your own site.
- [ ] The page passes a schema check and shows the right picture when shared.
- [ ] Your edits made in the Substack editor after publishing are in the import (pull from the live post, not a draft).
- [ ] A letter you take down on Substack can be taken down on your site too.