note.com is where people in Japan write when they have more to say than a social post allows: essays, how-tos, product reviews, company announcements and research. Everything sits on one Japanese domain run by a listed company, and its pages turn up in two places foreign marketers care about: Google’s Japanese results and the sources AI assistants cite when they answer in Japanese.
We have our own numbers on both. In our October 9, 2026 test of 21 Japanese product searches, note pages reached Google’s top 10 for 10 of them and ranked first for four. In our weekly monitoring of four AI services answering a fixed set of Japanese questions, note.com was the second most-cited domain from mid-September to late October 2026. We also checked whether the 30 companies at the top of the Forbes Cloud 100, a ranking of private software companies, run a note account. Two do. This article explains what note is, why its pages rank and get cited, what a company account involves, and where it fits for a brand entering Japan.
The short answer
note (written in lowercase) is a Japanese platform for long-form writing. Individuals use it like a blog with readers built in, and companies use it as a light owned media: a place to publish hiring, culture, research and product stories without building a site. As of August 31, 2026, it had 13.13 million registered members and 89.93 million published pieces, and its operator reports about 80,000 corporate accounts.
For a foreign brand, note matters first as a place where other people explain your category. Its pages can rank above the companies they write about, and in our monitoring, AI answers in Japanese cited them often. Opening your own account is a separate decision. In our view it pays off only if someone can write in Japanese, regularly, about questions Japanese readers actually search for. Of the 30 foreign software companies we checked, two run an official account on note, and only one has a sizable following.
If you do open one, treat it as a second site in Japanese, not a mirror of your blog: note offers no way to mark your site as the original of a reposted article.
What note.com is
note launched on April 7, 2014. It is run by note Inc. (note株式会社, called ピースオブケイク until April 2020), which listed on the Growth market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange on December 21, 2022 (ticker 5243). Its monthly audience, counted in browsers including non-members, averaged 91.23 million from December 2025 to May 2026.
Anyone can publish for free. Writers can also sell single pieces, bundle them into paid magazines or run a membership, and readers follow writers or magazines (マガジン, collections of pieces). The people writing range from students and hobbyists to engineers, consultants, editors and founders.
Two things set it apart from a typical blog host. note’s investor materials describe a design with no ads and no rankings, so a page reads like an essay rather than an ad slot. And every piece lives on note.com itself, under the writer’s handle (note.com/handle/n/…), so all of them share one domain’s reputation in search. That second point explains much of what follows, and it is also the main trade-off for a company.
Why note pages rank in Google Japan
On October 9, 2026, we ran 21 Japanese searches for products a foreign company could sell in Japan, mixing recommendation (おすすめ), review (評判, 口コミ) and how-to (やり方) queries, and sorted all 201 top-10 results. note pages appeared on 10 of the 21 queries. Among social and user-generated platforms, only YouTube appeared on more (12). note ranked first for four queries: VPN 評判 (VPN reviews), レンタルサーバー おすすめ (recommended web hosting), シャドーイング やり方 (how to practice shadowing) and 動画編集 やり方 (how to edit video). It was third for two more. YouTube ranked first once. Instagram, TikTok and X did not appear at all; the full breakdown is in our article on Japanese social media apps.
The domain-level picture points the same way. Rakko Keyword, a Japanese keyword tool, estimates how many Google Japan keywords each domain ranks for. On November 2, 2026, its figures for three well-known Japanese blogging platforms were these:
| Platform | Keywords ranked (top 100) | Keywords in the top 10 | Estimated traffic value per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| note (note.com) | 6.93 million | 1.67 million | USD 141.7 million |
| Ameba blog (ameblo.jp) | 7.61 million | 1.04 million | USD 34.9 million |
| Hatena Blog (hatenablog.com) | 1.84 million | 0.32 million | USD 13.0 million |
Ameba blog ranks for slightly more keywords, but note holds about 60% more top-10 positions, and Rakko values its search traffic at about four times Ameba’s. One likely reading is that note ranks for more commercial queries, while much of Ameba’s reach comes from personal and celebrity blogs. These are estimates, so treat the ratios as a rough signal.
We can only point to likely reasons: millions of pieces share one strong domain, and many are first-person accounts by people who did what they describe, the kind of experience Google’s guidelines ask for. For a company, the catch is that this strength belongs to note.com, not to your own domain.
How often AI answers cite note.com
Every week, Amanaut asks four AI services, ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini, the same set of Japanese questions about AI search optimization, a service we sell, and records the sources each answer cites. Over six measurement dates from September 15 to October 23, 2026, the answers cited sources 176 times. note.com was the second most-cited domain, with 34 citations, and it was also second in October alone. We published the monthly breakdown in Japanese on our own note account.
No single note piece made the 20 most-cited URLs. The citations were spread across many pieces by different writers, including a step-by-step guide written on a consultancy’s company account. That pattern suggests the AI services treat note as a pool of practitioner explanations rather than as one authority. Two limits apply: the questions cover one marketing topic, and Gemini showed sources only when it searched the web.
note does not keep AI crawlers out. Its robots.txt, checked on November 2, 2026, has no rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended. The company also works with AI firms directly: Google took a stake in January 2025, and since August 2025 note has supplied creators’ text to AI companies as training data, sharing the revenue with creators who do not opt out. For a foreign product, the useful check is whether anyone on note has explained your category in Japanese, and whether your product appears in those explanations. Our articles on how ChatGPT picks what to recommend in Japanese and on AI search in Japan show why AI answers tend to follow the explanations that already rank.
How Japanese companies use note
note Inc. reports about 80,000 corporate accounts and 1,078 paid note pro contracts as of August 2026. Any account can be switched to a corporate one in its settings at no cost. note pro costs JPY 80,000 a month or JPY 880,000 a year before tax, with no initial fee, and adds a custom domain, several editors with permissions, a verification badge after review, more detailed analytics and some marketing integrations. The case studies on its sales page include Kirin Brewery, the publisher Hayakawa Publishing, the research firm Macromill and the fintech company LayerX.
Japanese companies look into this themselves: Rakko Keyword puts “note pro” at about 1,300 searches a month in Japan and “note 運用代行” (outsourced note management) at 140. The corporate accounts we have looked at mostly publish a mix of hiring and culture stories, founders’ essays, the background to a product launch, and original research. Product and pricing pages rarely live there.
We run two accounts ourselves, one for the company and one for a book-recommendation service. On October 25, 2026, we rebuilt the company account (note.com/amanaut) around research data: we published 11 pieces on one day, collected them in a magazine, linked them to each other and pinned a monthly report to the top of the profile. We did not copy articles from our corporate blog, for the reason explained below.
Foreign software companies on note: what we found
On November 2, 2026, we checked the top 30 companies of the Forbes Cloud 100 for 2025, the same sample as our test of Japanese footprints. We searched note’s creator listings for each company’s Latin and katakana names, alone and with 公式 (official) or Japan, and looked for a link to note on 17 of their websites. An account counted as official only if its name or profile tied it to the company or its Japanese team. To measure how much others write about each company, we counted pieces tagged with its name as a hashtag (#Canva, #Stripe and so on), because note’s search no longer shows totals.
Two of the 30 run an official account. Canva Japan (note.com/canvajapan) has 6,554 followers, 392 pieces and note’s verification badge; its 2026 pieces are mostly round-ups announcing that a Japanese company’s website had featured Canva, and the latest was dated April 6, 2026. Grafana Labs’ Japan team (note.com/grafana_jp) posts technical pieces regularly, most recently on October 29, 2026, but had 19 followers. Neither uses note pro, and none of the 17 websites we checked, Canva’s included, links to a note account. Around the companies we found resellers, a student community and employees writing under their own names, but no other company accounts. One name collision stood out: note.com/plaid belongs to PLAID, a Japanese software company unrelated to Plaid Inc.
Hashtag counts split the sample in two. Eight companies had more than 1,000 tagged pieces: OpenAI (55,737), Canva (31,674), Anthropic (21,904), Notion (20,092), Cursor (7,702), Perplexity (6,819), Stripe (1,033) and Databricks (1,013). Eleven had ten or fewer, most of them security and data products: Tanium and Cohesity had four each, OneTrust and AlphaSense three, Abnormal AI one, and Checkr and Talkdesk none. The median across all 30 was 55. Our reading is that writing on note forms around tools individuals use themselves, and much less around software that IT and security teams buy, which matches our earlier finding that resellers often explain enterprise products in Japanese. A company in the first group already has a conversation on note to learn from. One in the second group is unlikely to get one unless it starts it, through its own account, its partners or Japanese media.
Setting up a note account for a foreign brand
Opening an account takes minutes. The decisions that matter come first: which plan, what to publish, and who will write it in Japanese.
Free account or note pro
A free account switched to corporate use is enough to find out whether you have something worth publishing. In our view, note pro’s JPY 80,000 a month pays mainly for the custom domain, multiple editors and analytics. The custom domain must be a root domain or subdomain, not a subfolder; if you cancel, the pieces return to note.com and outside links to the old URLs are not redirected. note’s own SEO FAQ says its advantage in traffic from AI search applies to the note.com domain and has not been confirmed for custom domains. For a foreign company, two limits apply: invoice payment is only for companies established under Japanese law, so a Japan branch or an overseas headquarters pays by credit card against prices quoted in yen, and receiving money from paid pieces requires a bank account in Japan. The terms neither require nor rule out a Japanese entity.
Original pieces, not copies of your blog
Reposting your blog articles on note puts two copies of each one on the web. note’s help center describes no way to point a canonical tag at the original, note pro does not accept custom HTML, and the two note articles we inspected carried canonical tags pointing to themselves. Google then chooses one copy to show, and given note.com’s strength, it may well choose note’s. That is why we wrote new pieces for our own account. If you want the same material in both places, write a short original piece on note and link to the full version on your site.
Written in Japanese, for Japanese questions
note’s interface and help center are in Japanese. Since May 2026, note has also translated free articles into English automatically (?hl=en), but the readers note brings you are Japanese. Translated posts rarely match the words Japanese readers search with, as our test in translation vs. localization for Japan showed. In our product-search test, seven of the ten note results promised the writer’s own experience in the title, such as 実際に使ってわかったこと (“what I learned from actually using it”) or 僕がガチで使ってるVPN (“the VPNs I really use”). One of the other three, a VPN setup guide in fourth place, came from the account of a used-PC shop. A foreign company can write in the same spirit about the problems its Japanese customers raise, starting from the questions its Japanese sales or support team hears.
Where note fits next to your own site and other people’s articles
We think of a foreign company’s Japanese presence in three layers. Your own Japanese site carries the product, pricing, help and company pages. A note account, if you keep one, carries perspective: research, the reasons behind decisions, stories about Japanese customers. The third layer is what others write about you: comparison sites, trade media and individual writers on note. That layer is often the largest. In our test of what Japanese buyers find when they look a company up, a median of seven of the top 10 Google results for a foreign software company’s name plus とは (“what is”) were explanations written by others.
You cannot write the third layer yourself, but you can make it easier for others to write it well: a clear Japanese product page, a Japanese press page, a contact who answers in Japanese. Our guide to Japanese media and sponsored article prices covers the paid route with outlets. If no one on your team writes Japanese yet, a sponsored feature on a Japanese site we run is another way to get one careful explanation of your product published in Japanese; it is labeled PR and costs JPY 40,000 per article.
Common questions
Three questions that come up when a team outside Japan considers a note account.
Can we publish in English on note?
You can, but it rarely makes sense. note’s readers and its search strength are Japanese, and since May 2026 note has translated free Japanese articles into English automatically, at the same address with ?hl=en. If English-speaking colleagues need to follow the account, that translation covers them. Write in Japanese for the readers you want.
Should we repost our blog articles on note?
We would not. note offers no setting that marks your site as the original, so the two copies compete, and note’s domain often wins. Write a shorter original piece on note and link to the full article on your site.
Will a note account help our own site rank?
Not directly. Pieces on note.com add to note’s domain, not yours. What can help is indirect: readers who find you on note search your name or click through to your product pages. With note pro and a custom domain, the pieces sit on your own domain instead, though note’s own SEO FAQ says the advantage it sees in AI search has not been confirmed for custom domains.
Working on Japan?
Nihongo Search is published by Amanaut, Inc., a small Japanese SEO and content company in Tokyo working with companies entering the Japanese market. For the platforms around note, see Japanese social media apps; for how Japanese content gets planned and written, see content marketing in Japan.
Sources
Our own work: the October 9, 2026 test of 21 Japanese product searches (201 top-10 results), our weekly monitoring of AI answers to Japanese questions (September 15 to October 23, 2026, 176 citations), the check of 30 foreign software companies on note (November 2, 2026) and the setup of our own note account. Domain statistics and search volumes come from Rakko Keyword (checked November 2, 2026). Everything else comes from the sources below.
- note Inc., Financial results presentation, Q3 FY2026 (October 6, 2026; members, pieces, corporate accounts, note pro contracts, MAU)
- note Inc., 東京証券取引所プライム市場への市場区分変更申請に向けた準備開始に関するお知らせ (notice on preparing a move to the Prime market, October 20, 2026)
- note Inc., IR FAQ (launch date, former name, listing; checked November 2, 2026)
- note help center, note pro pricing and payment (Japanese; updated September 14, 2026)
- note help center, Features of note and note pro compared (Japanese; updated October 26, 2026)
- note help center, Custom domains on note pro (Japanese; updated September 14, 2026)
- note help center, Search Console on note pro (Japanese; updated October 24, 2026)
- note help center, SEO FAQ for note pro (Japanese; updated October 29, 2026)
- note help center, Using note as a company or organization (Japanese; updated October 31, 2026)
- note help center, Using note from outside Japan (Japanese; updated October 30, 2026)
- note help center, Automatic translation of articles (Japanese; updated November 1, 2026)
- note, note pro ご利用規約 (note pro terms, 17th edition, July 15, 2026)
- note, robots.txt (checked November 2, 2026)
- note, Capital and business alliance with Google (Japanese, January 14, 2025)
- note, Program supplying creators’ text to AI companies (Japanese, June 17, 2025)
- note, Capital and business alliance with NAVER (Japanese, November 5, 2025)
- note, Automatic multilingual translation of articles (Japanese, April 22, 2026)
- note pro, sales page and case studies (checked November 2, 2026)
- Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (checked November 2, 2026)
- Amanaut, monthly report on sources cited by AI answers (Japanese, October 2026)
- Forbes, The Cloud 100 (2025) (September 3, 2025; sample for our check)
Last reviewed: November 2026.
