Substack Leaderboard Tracker — Rankings Over Time

Snapshot scrapers give you a photo. This gives you the movie.

Track Substack's category leaderboards — Top, Paid (bestsellers), and Rising — across all 32 categories, with built-in run-to-run history: every row carries prevRank, rankChange, and isNew, and you can optionally capture dropouts (publications that fell off a board) for churn analysis.

• 🏆 Three boards per category: Top (overall), Paid (bestseller ranking), Rising (trending)
• 🗂 All 32 Substack categories — Technology, Business, Finance, Culture, U.S. Politics, Health, Science, Crypto, and more
• 🔁 Rank deltas built in: prevRank, rankChange, isNew on every row from your second run
• 📉 Dropout detection (optional): see exactly which newsletters fell off a leaderboard and when
• 💰 Bestseller tiers & subscriber signals: bestseller badge tier (100/1,000/10,000), paid-subscriber magnitude ("Thousands of paid subscribers"), rounded free-subscriber counts ("311K+")
• 🗃 One continuous history table: optionally append every run to a named dataset
• ⚡ Fast & lightweight — pure JSON API, no browser, up to 525 ranks per board
• 📤 Export to Excel, CSV, JSON, or Parquet, or pull via API

Who uses leaderboard history?

• Newsletter operators & ghostwriting agencies — spot which niches and formats are climbing before they peak; track your own (or a client's) rank daily.
• Sponsorship & advertising buyers — a newsletter's trajectory (climbing Rising board, new bestseller badge) is the buy signal a single snapshot can't show.
• Creator-economy analysts & VCs — category-level churn and turnover rates, tracked from real rankings.
• Competitive intelligence — get alerted when a competitor enters the Paid board or overtakes you.

How it works

1. Pick categories (or all), boards, and depth (up to 525 ranks per board).
2. Run once — you get today's full ranking table with subscriber signals.
3. Schedule it daily (Apify → Schedules → this Actor → @daily). From the second run every row includes rank-change deltas, and history compounds from the day you start — it cannot be backfilled later.

Data comes from Substack's public, login-free category endpoints. Rankings, names, and badge tiers are public information; no personal data, no logins, no paywalled content.

Output example

{
    "category": "Technology",
    "board": "Paid",
    "snapshotDate": "2026-08-19",
    "rank": 1,
    "name": "SemiAnalysis",
    "authorName": "Dylan Patel",
    "url": "https://newsletter.semianalysis.com",
    "bestsellerTier": 10000,
    "paidSubscriberTier": "Tens of thousands of paid subscribers",
    "freeSubscriberCount": 311000,
    "freeSubscriberCountDisplay": "311K+",
    "prevRank": 2,
    "rankChange": 1,
    "isNew": false,
    "status": "ranked"
}

rankChange is positive when a publication climbed. isNew: true marks entries that weren't on the board in your previous snapshot. With Report dropped publications enabled, you also get status: "dropped" records with the publication's last known rank.

Category slugs

technology · business · finance · culture · us-politics · world-politics · health-politics · news · food · sports · art · music · faith · climate · science · literature · fiction · health · design · travel · parenting · philosophy · comics · international · crypto · history · humor · education · film-and-tv · home-garden · fashionandbeauty · podcast — or just enter all.

FAQ

How is this different from other Substack scrapers? Every other Substack actor returns a one-time snapshot (posts or a single leaderboard pull). This one is built for time series: it maintains state between runs, computes rank deltas and dropouts automatically, and can maintain one ever-growing history dataset.

Are exact paid-subscriber counts included? Substack never publishes exact paid counts. You get what Substack shows publicly: bestseller badge tiers and order-of-magnitude labels — plus rounded free-subscriber counts.

How many rows per run? categories × boards × maxRank. 5 categories × 2 boards × 100 ranks = 1,000 rows. You are charged per row.

Is this legal? The Actor reads Substack's public, unauthenticated category endpoints — the same data shown to any logged-out visitor. It collects no personal data and accesses no paywalled content.

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Built by rowsmith. Also see: App Store Rank Tracker — the same rankings-over-time engine for Apple's App Store & Google Play top charts.