Findable

The 'Oops" I found when I ran the AI Visibility Audit on myself.

I built an AI Visibility Audit service. Then I ran it on myself.

My newsletter wasn't hard to find.

It wasn't buried on page three.

It wasn't anywhere.

Let's start at the beginning.

I'd been developing the AI Visibility Audit — a structured way to help authors find out whether AI systems can see them, describe them, and recommend them. The premise is simple: the way readers find books and newsletters is changing. AI assistants are increasingly part of that discovery chain. If AI can't find you, it can't recommend you.

I'd done the research. Built the framework. Run it on three clients — a newsletter creator, a published author, and a coach.

Then I sat down to run it on my own Substack newsletter.

Results: Curiosity Unhinged had no search visibility.

Not low visibility — no visibility. Multiple searches for the newsletter by name, by my name alongside the topic, by related terms.

Nothing. Nada.

I'd been publishing for months. Posting consistently. Building in public.

How is this possible?

Why AI Visibility matters (even if you're not chasing growth)

Most newsletter platforms have their own discovery engines — internal search, recommendation features, explore pages. And they work. For readers already inside that ecosystem.

But something is shifting underneath.

Readers are increasingly asking AI assistants what to read, who to follow, which newsletters are worth their time. Not everyone. Not yet. But enough that the question "does AI know you exist?" is starting to matter.

If you only want to build your audience through your platform's native tools, you don't have to care about this. Just realize that limits you to readers who are already part of that community.

If you want to build something that compounds — readers who find you through more than one path, a presence that holds up as discovery modes change — then being findable outside your platform has to be part of your infrastructure. Not all of it. A part of it.

I didn't think I had a gap. I was wrong.

The missing step

I started with the obvious things. Was I blocking AI crawlers? Was something misconfigured? Nothing obvious came up.

I have a confession to make. I hate these kinds of problems — the ones where something technical is broken and the answer isn't obvious. I like things simple and straightforward. Technology isn't usually that straightforward. A source of regular frustration, especially for someone who spent years working in IT.

But this time, I had AI to help me. It told me why my newsletter was a ghost, what I had to do to fix it, and walked me through it step by step.

Turns out, I was missing from Google's indexing. And that matters more than most writers realize.

Google's indexing is the primary gatekeeper for AI search features. Google AI Overviews — and the data that informs most AI assistants — runs through the same indexing pipeline as regular Google search. If your content isn't in Google's index, it's invisible to AI recommendation systems regardless of what settings you've configured on your platform.

I doubt most writers know this. I certainly didn't. You publish something. It goes live on the internet. The assumption that Google can see it is reasonable.

It's also wrong — unless you've taken a specific step to make it happen.

Hooking up the plumbing

The fix is Google Search Console connected through Google Tag Manager. This applies whether you're on Substack, WordPress, Squarespace, or your own domain — the core setup is the same.

Here's how it works:

First, create a Google Tag Manager account. You'll get a GTM ID — a code that looks something like GTM-XXXXXXX. (If the terminology is unfamiliar, AI is remarkably good at walking you through what each piece means and does.)

Then add that GTM ID to your platform. On most newsletter and website platforms this lives in the Analytics or Integrations section of your settings — paste the ID and save. On a self-hosted site, it goes into your site header. Your platform's help documentation will show you exactly where.

After that, go to Google Search Console. Add your site or newsletter as a property. Google will verify ownership automatically using the Tag Manager ID you just installed.

Ownership verified.

That's the message you're looking for. It means Google can see your site.

But you're not finished. You still need to submit your sitemap — which tells Google what pages and posts exist — and manually request indexing for your most important content. The sitemap submission is straightforward. Manual indexing is where new accounts hit a daily quota limit, which is apparently completely normal. Expect this step to take a few days to work through. If you leave it to Google to index on its own, it takes approximately three months.

One morning of setup. Three months saved.

This is the first layer of the AI Visibility formula:

AI Visibility = Findable + Selectable + Trustable

Findable is the plumbing. It's not the whole strategy — but without it, nothing else works.

A quick check you can run right now

Go to Google and search your newsletter or website name. Then search your name alongside your main topic.

If nothing from your own site comes up in the results, you're likely not indexed. You probably have the same gap I had.

The fix is not complicated. It just requires knowing it exists.

And if you want to know more specifically where you stand — what AI systems can currently see about you, how they describe you, and where the gaps are — that's exactly what an AI Visibility Audit is for.

Learn more about the AI Visibility Audit :  Work With Me

Part of the AI Visibility series: [Selectable] | [Trustable]