How to Get Published on Medium (And What Nobody Tells You About Indexing)

Both halves of that are true at once, and almost nobody says the second half.

What Medium is

A publishing platform, not a newsroom. Pieces are published by their authors and surface through topic feeds, search and the platform's own recommendations rather than through an editor commissioning them.

That is the trade. There is no editor to convince, and equally no editor to put their name behind the piece.

What it is genuinely good for

Length. There is no word limit imposed by a layout and no house angle to fit. If what you have is a long argument, a technical explanation or a founding story that dies when cut to four hundred words, this is where it survives intact.

Speed. About a day, against a market average of two weeks.

AI engines. Medium is read heavily by the systems that answer questions, so a well-argued piece there can become the source behind an answer about your field. See how AI engines choose sources.

Building a body of work. Several pieces under one name, in one place, reads as a practice rather than a one-off.

The two things to be honest about

It passes no link authority. Every outbound link on Medium is nofollow and has been for years. DR 94 and it lends you none of it. This is the sharpest illustration of the pattern in which publications give do-follow links: the highest-authority domains are the least willing to pass any.

Indexing is not guaranteed. This is the part that surprises people. Medium is an enormous platform and Google does not index everything on it. A piece can be live, readable and reachable by its URL, and still not appear in search results for your name.

Of the major titles we place in, Medium is the only one where this is a known risk rather than a near-certainty the other way.

So what is it worth

It is worth a lot for the right job and almost nothing for the wrong one.

Right job: you have something substantial to say, you want it read by people in your field and by AI engines, and you will point people to it yourself.

Wrong job: you want a feature that appears when a stranger searches your name and passes authority to your site. Medium is close to the worst major option for that, despite having the best metrics on paper.

That is the whole lesson. The metrics describe the platform, not your piece.

How to make a piece work there

Write one argument, not a summary. The platform's readers are there for depth. A 500-word overview of your company gets nothing.

Be specific and be wrong-footing. The pieces that travel contain a number, a mistake or a position the reader did not expect.

Do not treat it as a press release. Nothing on Medium reads more obviously out of place.

Point to it. Because indexing is uncertain, treat Medium as something you link to rather than something people will stumble upon.

Who it suits

Technical founders with something to explain. Anyone whose argument does not fit a magazine. People building a body of published work over time.

If what you need is a recognisable masthead that shows up in search, a title like Entrepreneur or TheStreet does that job and Medium does not.

The short version

DR 94, 57.8 million monthly visits, published in a day. No link authority, and indexing is not guaranteed.

It is the right home for a long, serious argument and the wrong one for a searchable credibility feature.

Write something worth the length, then point people to it yourself.

See our Medium page, or what is a contributor article for how this differs from editorial coverage.