IndexNow

How IndexNow works

You generate a key of 8 to 128 hexadecimal characters, host it as a {key}.txt file at your site root, then send an HTTP request to a participating engine each time a URL changes. A single URL uses a GET like https://<searchengine>/indexnow?url=changed-url&key=your-key; batches use a JSON POST of up to 10,000 URLs. Submit to one participating engine and the URL is shared automatically with all the others.

The protocol is a notification, not a guarantee. It tells an engine a page was added, updated, or deleted so it can prioritize a recrawl, but each engine still decides whether the page is worth indexing. Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam.cz honor the ping. Google is the notable holdout: it confirmed testing the protocol back in 2021 but has not adopted it, so sitemaps and Search Console remain your channel there.

In practice IndexNow matters most for sites that change often, like news, large catalogs, and listings, where waiting on a scheduled crawl costs visibility on Bing and its partners. Microsoft frames the upside as fewer exploratory crawls, lower server load, and faster reflection of changes. Many platforms ship it built in (WordPress via Yoast or Rank Math, and Cloudflare at the CDN edge), so enabling it is often a config step rather than custom code. Spamming submissions can trigger a 429 Too Many Requests response, so it is meant for real changes, not bulk resubmission.