IndexNow explained: get new pages into Bing, Yandex & co. faster

What IndexNow is

IndexNow is an open protocol launched in 2021 by Microsoft Bing and Yandex. Instead of waiting for a crawler, your site sends a short notification: “These URLs have changed.” The search engine can then crawl them sooner.

Participating search engines include Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver and Yep. They share submissions with each other, so one request to any of them (or to the shared endpoint at api.indexnow.org) reaches all of them. You don’t have to notify each engine separately.

Bing matters beyond Bing itself: other services use its index, and ChatGPT search is widely reported to use Bing among its sources. Being indexed there can help with being found in AI search, though nobody outside these companies knows exactly how much.

Does Google use IndexNow?

No. Google has tested IndexNow but hasn’t adopted it. Submitting URLs via IndexNow does nothing for Google Search.

For Google, keep using an XML sitemap submitted in Search Console under Sitemaps and good internal links. For a single important page, URL Inspection has “Request indexing”, with a limited daily quota. If Google knows a page but doesn’t index it, IndexNow won’t fix that – see page not indexed for the usual causes.

Step 1: Create and host your key

IndexNow proves that you own the site with a key. The key is 8 to 128 characters long and may contain letters (a–z, A–Z), digits and hyphens. A random 32-character hex string works well.

Save the key in a plain text file named after the key, with the key as the only content, and upload it to the root of your site. Check that it opens in the browser and returns the key, not a redirect, login page or 404. If you can’t put the file in the root, you can host it elsewhere on the same host and pass its URL as keyLocation in every request. This is a made-up example:

File: https://www.example.com/3f7a9c2e5b8d4f1a6c0e9b7d2a4f8c1e.txt
Content:
3f7a9c2e5b8d4f1a6c0e9b7d2a4f8c1e

Step 2: Submit a single URL (GET)

The quickest way to submit one URL is a GET request. You can even paste it into the browser’s address bar. Encode the URL you submit (e.g. “:” becomes %3A and “/” becomes %2F) so it’s read correctly:

https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fblog%2Fnew-article%2F&key=3f7a9c2e5b8d4f1a6c0e9b7d2a4f8c1e

Step 3: Submit many URLs at once (POST)

For more than a handful of URLs, send one POST request with a JSON body. One request can contain up to 10,000 URLs, and they all have to belong to the host you name. keyLocation is only needed if your key file isn’t in the root. You can send this with curl, a script, or a tool like Postman:

POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{
  "host": "www.example.com",
  "key": "3f7a9c2e5b8d4f1a6c0e9b7d2a4f8c1e",
  "keyLocation": "https://www.example.com/3f7a9c2e5b8d4f1a6c0e9b7d2a4f8c1e.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://www.example.com/blog/new-article/",
    "https://www.example.com/products/updated-product/",
    "https://www.example.com/old-page-we-deleted/"
  ]
}

What the response codes mean

The response only tells you whether your submission was received – not whether a page will be indexed.

When to submit – and when not to

Submit URLs when something actually changed: a new page, a meaningful update, or a page you deleted or redirected. Don’t resubmit your whole site every day and don’t ping the same unchanged URL again and again. That doesn’t speed anything up and can get you rate-limited.

Submission doesn’t guarantee indexing. The search engine still decides whether a page is worth crawling and indexing, so thin or duplicate pages won’t get in just because you submitted them.

You might not need to do anything by hand. Several WordPress SEO plugins and some CDNs (for example Cloudflare with Crawler Hints) can send IndexNow notifications automatically when content changes. Check your CMS or hosting settings before building your own. To see what Bing received, Bing Webmaster Tools has an IndexNow section that lists submitted URLs.

Submit URLs from your iPhone with Rankpilot

Rankpilot is an iPhone and iPad app that is coming soon to the App Store. It can submit URLs via IndexNow and checks your key file first, so you know right away whether it’s reachable and correct. If you connect Bing Webmaster Tools, you also see your Bing searches and can import backlinks.

For Google, Rankpilot’s Search Console connection includes an index watch that warns you when pages drop out of the index. The app is free, with Rankpilot Pro as an optional subscription.