01
Your URLs
Up to 1,000, absolute and all on the same domain. Deleted pages are sent too: the engine will request them again and see the 404 or 410.
02
Your key
Between 8 and 128 characters: letters, digits and hyphens. Generate one or paste the one you already use.
Publish this file at the root of your domain
—
How to use it
01
Generate and publish the key
A random string proving the domain is yours. Upload it as a text file at the root and check it from here.
02
Paste the URLs
New pages, changed pages and deleted pages. One per line, up to a thousand, all on the same domain.
03
Send
A single submission reaches every participating engine. The response tells you whether it was accepted and, if not, why.
What IndexNow is and who uses it
An open protocol, created by Microsoft and Yandex in 2021, so a site can tell search engines that a URL changed instead of waiting to be re-crawled. Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and Yep take part. A submission to any of them is shared with all the others.
Google does not take part. For Google, what still matters is a sitemap with correct modification dates and, for one-offs, URL inspection in Search Console. Google’s absence does not diminish the rest: Bing feeds DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and ChatGPT search.
When to send, and when not to
When a page is published, when it genuinely changes and when it is deleted or redirected. All three are news; the engine goes, looks and updates. After a migration, the batch of new URLs is the submission that speeds things up most: the engine discovers the new addresses without walking the old ones one by one.
You do not send the whole site every day, nor the same URL several times without a change. The engine compares what it receives with what it sees, and a site that announces changes that do not exist loses credibility: its notices go to the back of the queue.
The notice should go out on its own
Submitting URLs by hand works for a batch of changes or after a migration. For day to day, the notice has to be part of publishing: when the content goes out, the engine finds out, without anyone remembering.
On the sites we build, every deploy compares the new sitemap with the previous one and sends only what changed. It is one line in the publishing process, and the same logic we apply to any automatic notice: it happens when something happens, and only then.
Frequently asked questions
Does Google use IndexNow?
No. Google said it tested it and did not adopt it; it still discovers pages by crawling and through sitemaps. IndexNow works for Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and Yep, and through Bing for everything fed by its index, such as DuckDuckGo or ChatGPT search. For Google, what speeds things up is a sitemap with a correct lastmod.
Does it guarantee the page gets indexed?
No. It is a notice that something changed, not a command. The engine decides whether to crawl the URL and whether to index it with the same criteria as always: quality, relevance and not being blocked. What it saves is the wait until the crawler comes by on its own, which can be days.
How many URLs can I send?
Up to ten thousand per request according to the protocol; this tool caps it at a thousand, which is more than changes in a day on almost any site. There is no published daily limit, but sending the whole site every day is considered abuse and engines may start ignoring your notices.
What if I send the same URL many times?
Nothing good. The engine requests it once and, if it has not changed, learns that your notices are unreliable. Send a URL when it genuinely changes: when published, edited or deleted.
Where does the key file go?
At the root of the domain: https://yourdomain.com/<key>.txt, with the key as its only content. If you cannot write to the root, the protocol accepts another path on the same domain declared as keyLocation in each submission; this tool uses the root, which is the simplest.
Can I use it with WordPress or Shopify?
WordPress has an official IndexNow plugin, and Yoast, Rank Math and AIOSEO integrate it: they notify on publish by themselves. Shopify, Wix and Squarespace do not ship it; there, this tool is for notifying by hand after a batch of changes.
How do I automate it?
With a POST request to api.indexnow.org from your deploy process or your CMS publish hook, with the URLs that changed in that release. On the sites we build it happens on its own: the build compares the new sitemap with the previous one and sends the difference.
Is the key stored?
No. The key and the URLs travel from your browser to our Cloudflare function and from there to api.indexnow.org, without being stored anywhere. Bear in mind the key is yours: anyone who has it can submit URLs for your domain, so do not publish it anywhere other than the verification file.
Do you publish and wait to be found?
Notifying search engines, a sitemap with real dates and verified redirects are three lines in a well-built deploy. We put them in yours.
We reply within one business dayBogotá · UTC−5