Substack Leaderboards and Bestseller Badges Explained

What are Substack leaderboards?

Substack leaderboards are ranked lists of publications on the Explore page, one set per category, such as sports, business or fiction. Substack says they exist to help "creators get discovered and readers find new voices" (Substack Help). You find them by tapping a category tab at the top of Explore, in the app or on the web.

Each category has two views:

• Top Bestsellers: "the highest-earning publications, ranked by Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)". Updated daily.
• Rising: "the fastest-growing publications in a category, based on paid subscription growth". Updated every few hours.

A publication can appear in both views but in only one category at a time (Substack Help).

This page explains the mechanics only. We don't reproduce or track the rankings themselves: view them on Substack, where they're current.

How are Substack rankings calculated?

Substack publishes the inputs but not the formula. Here is what its help centre says, as of October 2026:

	Top Bestsellers	Rising
Ranks by	Annual recurring revenue (ARR)	Paid subscription growth
Updates	Daily	Every few hours
What it rewards	Total paid revenue	Recent momentum
Free subscribers count?	No (paid revenue only)	No (paid growth only)
Scope	One category per publication	One category per publication

Source: Substack Help: What are Substack leaderboards?

Two practical consequences follow:

• Paid metrics only. Both views rank paid revenue or paid growth, so a large free list alone won't place you.
• Rising is the realistic target for newer paid publications. Because it measures growth, a smaller publication with a burst of new paid subscribers can show up there before it has enough revenue for Top Bestsellers.

Substack's help centre also says "All categories are automated based on total paid subscribers or recent paid subscription growth", which is a slightly different description of the Top Bestsellers input from "ARR". Substack doesn't explain how annual and monthly plans, founding members or discounts are weighted, so treat any precise formula you see elsewhere as a guess.

How do I get my publication on a leaderboard?

There's no application. Substack says placement is automated and "You'll receive a notification when your publication appears on a leaderboard" (Substack Help). What you control:

1. Turn on paid subscriptions. Both leaderboard views rank paid metrics.
2. Choose your primary category carefully. In Settings → Basics, pick what your publication is about. If you appear on a leaderboard, you're listed "only under the primary category you select" (Substack Help).
3. Expect review of odd choices. Category selections are "requests"; Substack "reserves the right to adjust inappropriate assignments".
4. Grow paid subscriptions. That is the only input Substack names. Our guides to making money on Substack and Substack Notes cover the fee math and the network features that drive paid growth.

What are country leaderboards?

Since June 2026, readers and creators in the UK, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain see country leaderboards for the country they're in, with 50 publications on each Top Bestsellers and Rising list (Substack Help).

• Your country comes from Stripe, not your category: "your Stripe account is set to this specific country" (Substack Help).
• Your profile shows your country rank if it's higher than your category rank.
• You can opt out in Settings → Privacy with the "Opt out of country leaderboards" toggle.
• Wrong country? You can request a change, but only if you're currently assigned to one of the five countries with leaderboards.

Separately, Substack Around the World lets readers pick from more than 50 countries to see top publications and posts. Top posts there are trending free posts, and top publications (free and paid) are based on the publication's location (Substack Help). That's the one ranking surface where free publications can appear.

What do Substack Bestseller badges mean?

Bestseller badges are coloured checkmarks next to a creator's name. They're based on the number of paid subscribers a publication has "at that time" (Substack Help):

Badge colour	Paid subscribers
White	Hundreds
Orange	Thousands
Purple	Tens of thousands

Rules worth knowing:

• Free trials and comped subscriptions don't count.
• It isn't a verification badge. The only way to earn one is "to start and grow a paid publication to hundreds of subscribers".
• You can hide it in your profile's Activity privacy section, or in your publication's Team settings. You can't show a badge you don't qualify for.
• Readers have badges too. A flower badge shows that someone pays for 1+, 5+ or 10+ Substack subscriptions; gifted and comped subscriptions don't count (Substack Help).

Bestseller status also unlocks features. Substack's official MCP server, which lets AI assistants read your dashboard metrics, requires that "Your publication must be a Bestseller publication" (Substack Help). Creator Kits for sponsorships are open to Bestsellers or publications "with at least 100 paid subscribers" (Substack Help).

Why doesn't this page list the top Substacks?

Three reasons:

• They go stale fast. Rising changes every few hours and Top Bestsellers daily, so any copy is out of date almost immediately.
• Substack's Terms. The Terms of Use prohibit crawling or scraping and storing "any significant portion of the content on Substack". Collecting rankings into our own dataset would cut against that.
• The figures belong to writers. Revenue and subscriber bands are about individual businesses.

If you want numbers, start with your own. Your Substack export holds your subscriber and post stats, and the newsletterapi analytics API turns that export into growth, cohort and engagement trends, including the paid growth the leaderboards rank on. Our MCP server makes them available to AI agents. For platform-wide figures, see Substack statistics; for what Substack offers developers, see the Substack API guide.