What is IndexNow, and is it worth using?

When you publish a new page or change an existing one, search engines do not find out at that moment. They find out when they next come by your site, following links or reading your sitemap, and that “next” can be a few hours or a few weeks away, depending on how often they visit.

IndexNow turns that model around: instead of waiting for the search engine to come and look, you tell it which URLs have changed.

How it works

IndexNow is an open protocol introduced by Microsoft Bing and Yandex in 2021. Its mechanics are deliberately simple:

1. You generate a key, a string of 8 to 128 characters (letters, digits and hyphens).
2. You publish it on your domain as a text file at the root, with the key as both its name and its content: https://yourdomain.com/<your-key>.txt. That proves the domain is yours.
3. You submit the URLs that have changed, together with the key, to an IndexNow endpoint. It can be a single URL or a list.
4. The search engine verifies the key by requesting that file from your domain. If it matches, it accepts the notice and schedules the visit.

There is no sign-up, account or dashboard. The key replaces all of that: if you can publish a file at the root of your domain, you are the one who controls it.

The protocol also allows the key to live at another path, stated in the submission, but the root is the simplest option and the least error-prone.

Which search engines use it

This is the part that causes most confusion. IndexNow is supported by Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam, among others. And participants share notices: submit a URL to one of them and the rest receive it too. There is no need to notify each search engine separately.

Google does not use it. It has tested it, but it is not part of the protocol, and submitting URLs through IndexNow has no effect on Google.

That does not make it irrelevant. Bing’s index also feeds other services, such as Copilot and some of DuckDuckGo’s results, and in certain markets Yandex, Naver or Seznam hold a significant share. But if your traffic depends almost entirely on Google, expectations are worth adjusting.

What Google relies on instead

For Google, the routes remain the usual ones:

• The XML sitemap with reliable lastmod dates, which Google uses to decide what to recrawl. This is covered in what is an XML sitemap.
• URL Inspection in Search Console, which lets you request indexing for individual pages.
• Internal links: a new page linked from the home page, or from pages Google visits often, gets discovered sooner.

For years there was also a sitemap “ping”, an address you could call to say your sitemap had changed. Google retired it in 2023, so that method no longer works.

What to submit

IndexNow is meant for changes, not for submitting the whole site every day. What makes sense to announce:

• New pages: an article, a product, a service.
• Pages changed in a meaningful way: a corrected price, an updated listing, information that has changed.
• Deleted pages: these get submitted too. The search engine will request them again, see the 404 or 410 and drop them from its index sooner.
• URLs that now redirect: so the search engine finds the new destination without waiting.

What makes no sense is resubmitting URLs that have not changed. The protocol is clear that it is a change notice, and search engines may give less weight to notices from a site that uses them as noise.

The protocol allows up to 10,000 URLs per submission, all on the same domain as the key.

Does it guarantee indexing?

No. IndexNow tells the search engine “this URL has changed, come and see”, and the search engine decides whether it comes, when, and whether it then indexes the page. A thin or duplicate page does not get into the index because you announced it.

What it does improve is discovery time: the search engine learns about the change straight away instead of waiting for its next visit. For a site that rarely changes, that difference is small. For one that changes a lot, it can be noticeable.

When it is worth it

The cases where it adds most:

• Online shops, where prices, stock and products change often and an out-of-date listing in results turns into frustrated visits.
• Media and frequently updated blogs, where freshness matters.
• Large sites, where the search engine is slow to revisit deep pages.
• After a migration or restructure, so participating search engines discover the redirects and new URLs promptly.

For a corporate site updated a few times a year the benefit is modest, although setting it up costs next to nothing either.

In practice, many people do not submit URLs by hand. Several CMSs, SEO plugins and content delivery networks (CDNs) integrate IndexNow and send notices automatically whenever something is published or edited. If your platform offers it, that is usually the most convenient option.

Getting started with yours

The IndexNow submitter covers the protocol’s three steps: it generates a valid key (or takes the one you already use), gives you the file to publish at the root of your domain and checks that it responds with the key before sending anything. Then you paste the new or changed URLs, up to a thousand per batch, and it drops any that are not absolute, are duplicated or belong to another domain, and shows you the service’s response and what it means.

It is most useful for one-off notices: a batch of new products, a rewritten section or the URLs you have just redirected. For continuous notices, your CMS or CDN integration is the sensible route. And for Google, make sure your sitemap is in order with the sitemap checker.

---

IndexNow is a useful, inexpensive shortcut for Bing and the other participating search engines, not a substitute for the sitemap and not a route into Google. Use it for what it is: announcing real changes at the moment they happen.