Substack's terms forbid any use that crawls, scrapes or spiders Substack, by hand or by machine, and copying a significant part of its content. Every publication has a public RSS feed, which is the machine route Substack documents. Writers can export their own posts and subscriber lists. Admins of Bestseller publications can connect AI assistants to their own data through Substack's MCP server. A proxy does not change any of this.
What Substack's terms say
Substack's terms took effect on April 21, 2025. Their acceptable use policy lists what you agree not to do.
| rule | what the terms say |
|---|---|
| scraping | Any use that "Crawls," "scrapes," or "spiders" any page, data or portion of Substack, "through use of manual or automated means". |
| copying | Any use that "Copies or stores any significant portion of the content on Substack". |
| load | Any process "that otherwise interferes with the proper working of Substack (including placing an unreasonable load on Substack's infrastructure)". |
The RSS feed
Substack's help center gives the feed address in this form: https://your.substack.com/feed. The publication's name goes in place of "your". We read the feed of Substack's own publication, on.substack.com, on October 4, 2026. It held 20 posts, with between 329 and 3,949 words of text each.
For podcasts, Substack gives each subscriber a private feed of their own. Paid episodes appear in it only for paid subscribers. The help pages we read do not say what the public feed shows for a paid text post.
Exports and the MCP server, for writers
Substack tells writers: "Anything you publish on Substack is yours to own." In a publication's Settings, under Exports, Substack builds a zip file with the posts, the subscriber list and related statistics.
Substack's MCP server connects a publication to AI assistants. In Substack's words, it gives "read-only access to publication data such as dashboard metrics, traffic data, and publication settings". It needs an admin of a Bestseller publication, and it cannot read profile data or Notes.
The routes Substack documents, side by side:
| route | who can use it | what it gives |
|---|---|---|
| RSS feed | anyone | a publication's latest posts, 20 in the feed we read. |
| Exports | the publication's writer | a zip file with posts, the subscriber list and statistics. |
| MCP server | admins of Bestseller publications | read-only publication data for an AI assistant. |
| Who can use it | What it gives | |
|---|---|---|
| RSS feed | anyone | a publication's latest posts, 20 in the feed we read |
| Exports | the publication's writer | a zip of posts, the subscriber list and statistics |
| MCP server | admins of Bestseller publications | read-only publication data for an AI assistant |
What robots.txt says
Substack's robots.txt keeps every crawler it does not name out of the sign-in, publishing and subscribe pages, private feeds, comments, the inbox and embeds. It shuts one named crawler, BLEXBot, out of the whole site. A publication's own robots.txt, such as on.substack.com's, carries the same rules. The robots.txt standard, RFC 9309, says its rules "are not a form of access authorization", so the terms still decide.
The scrapers on GitHub
A search of GitHub for "substack scraper" lists 73 projects. The most starred one downloads "free and premium Substack posts", and for the paid ones it signs in with your email and password. Others drive a Selenium browser, borrow your logged-in browser session, or rest on "reverse engineering" the site. One README asks users to respect "Substack's terms of service", but none of the five we read says what those terms say.
Where a proxy fits
For Substack, a proxy does not fit. The terms forbid crawling and scraping by any means, whatever address it comes from, and the RSS feeds are public.
For other work where a proxy is allowed, what a residential proxy is explains the type. How to check if a proxy is working shows how to test one. Residential traffic without city targeting starts at $0.44/GB, and every plan is on our pricing page.
The limits of this page
We read Substack's terms, its robots.txt, four help articles and one publication's feed from our server in the United States on October 4, 2026. We did not sign in, export anything or connect the MCP server. The help pages we read do not say what the public feed shows for paid text posts. This page is due for a check by January 4, 2027.
Sources
Every page below was read on October 4, 2026, from our server in the United States.
- Substack, Terms of Use, in effect since April 21, 2025.
- Substack Support, Is there an RSS feed for my publication? and Will my Podcast RSS feed show paid-only content?
- Substack Support, How do I export my posts? and How to connect Substack to your AI Assistant.
- Substack's robots.txt, the feed of on.substack.com, and IETF, RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion Protocol.
- GitHub's repository search for "substack scraper" (not linked).
