Guide : WebSub

WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub) is a push protocol que broadcasts RSS/Atom feed changements to moteur de recherches comme Google in réel temps — Ce que c’est, Comment cela fonctionne, and its limites.

Première publication : 26 juin 2026 · Dernière mise à jour : 3 août 2026 · Advanced
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WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub) is a W3C push protocol — a Recommendation since Jan 2018, republished with security fixes in June 2026 — que broadcasts RSS/Atom feed changements to moteur de recherches the moment vous publish, au lieu de waiting pour les to poll votre feed. Vous advertise a hub in votre feed (Google runs un at pubsubhubbub.appspot.com, confirmed live) and ping it on publish; the hub fans the mettre à jour out to subscribers. Google confirms it supports WebSub pour Atom/RSS. But it seulement fonctionne pour feeds — pas arbitrary pages — and it seulement speeds discovery, jamais guaranteeing a explorer or index. Pour pushing general pages, IndexNow (Bing and others) is the correct outil, pas WebSub; Bing's separate news-only PubHub stopped taking nouveau publishers in June 2025.

TL;DR — WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub; a W3C Recommendation since January 2018, reaffirmed with a security-focused mettre à jour in June 2026) is the push complement to RSS/Atom’s pull. A publisher advertises a hub in its feed (<link rel="hub">), subscribers register with que hub, and on publish the publisher pings the hub so it fans the mis à jour feed out to every subscriber. Search services peut subscribe, but WebSub itself rend aucun promise que quelconque search engine va explorer or index une URL. It is designed autour topic resources tel as feeds, pas as a general indexation API. Pour participating moteur de recherches, IndexNow is a separate URL-notification protocol — and as of mid-2025, Bing has aussi stopped taking nouveau sign-ups pour its propre news-feed submission program (plus ci-dessous), qui narrows the field plus loin.

Evidence for this claim WebSub is a W3C publish-subscribe protocol in which publishers advertise hubs and subscribers receive content-change notifications. Scope: WebSub protocol; notification is not search indexing. Confidence: high · Verified: W3C Recommendation: WebSub Evidence for this claim WebSub has no standardized guarantee of search-engine crawling or indexing; search push protocols such as IndexNow have separate participants and semantics. Scope: Distinction between feed subscription and IndexNow URL notification. Confidence: high · Verified: IndexNow protocol documentation

WebSub is the push half of feeds

In the Discovery hub I split discovery into pull and push. RSS/Atom feeds are a pull channel: the engine polls votre feed on its propre cadence (Google’s Feedfetcher, pour instance, won’t pull la plupart feeds plus que à propos de une fois an hour). WebSub is ce que turns que pull into a push — au lieu de waiting to be re-fetched, votre feed broadcasts the modifier the moment vous publish.

That’s the whole valeur proposition: near-real-time notification of feed updates, plutôt que waiting pour the suivant scheduled poll.

PubSubHubbub vs WebSub — même protocol, différent nom

Ce trips personnes up in documentation searches. The protocol was originally appelé PubSubHubbub (abbreviated PSH). It was renamed WebSub in October 2017 and publié as a W3C Recommendation in January 2018. Pre-2018 articles dire “PubSubHubbub”; post-2018 articles dire “WebSub.” They’re the même chose, and Google’s hub encore réponses to les deux — qui John Mueller confirmed at the temps of the rename (“Yes, finally dug it up! We support both.”).

The spec itself hasn’t stood encore since 2018, soit: the W3C republished WebSub as a nouveau Recommendation on 2 June 2026, ajout cross-site-scripting (XSS) mitigations to the Security Considerations section. That’s a security-hardening mettre à jour, pas a mechanics modifier — the actors, discovery relations, and subscribe/ publish flow décrit ci-dessous are the même protocol as the 2018 version. Si you’re implementing (pas simplement consuming) WebSub, lire the current Recommendation plutôt que a copy of the 2018 text.

How WebSub en réalité fonctionne

Là are three actors:

  • Publisher — votre site (specifically, votre feed).
  • Hub — a relay server que handles subscriptions and fan-out.
  • Subscriber — a moteur de recherche (or quelconque client) que veut updates.

The W3C spec frames the flow plainly: “Subscribers découvrir the hub of a topic URL, and rend a POST to un or plus of the advertised hubs in order to recevoir updates quand the topic changements. Publishers notify leur hub(s) URLs quand leur topic(s) modifier. Quand the hub identifies a modifier in the topic, it sends a content distribution notification to tout registered subscribers.”

Evidence for this claim WebSub is a W3C publish-subscribe protocol in which publishers advertise hubs and subscribers receive content-change notifications. Scope: WebSub protocol; notification is not search indexing. Confidence: high · Verified: W3C Recommendation: WebSub

En pratique, pour le SEO:

  1. Votre feed advertises a hub with a <link rel="hub" href="..."> tag (plus a <link rel="self" href="..."> pointing at the feed’s propre URL).
  2. Subscribers (moteur de recherches) register with que hub pour votre feed.
  3. Quand vous publish, votre site notifies the hub que votre feed modifié.
  4. The hub récupère votre mis à jour feed and fans it out to every subscriber via an HTTP POST to leur callback URL.

Step 2 is doing plus fonctionner que “register” implies. The spec breaks subscription into separate states: a subscription requête, a verification step où the hub confirms the subscriber en réalité veut the topic (so nobody peut subscribe a stranger’s callback URL sans leur say-so), a lease the subscription holds pour a bounded temps, and a renewal the subscriber has to faire avant que lease expires (there’s aucun tel chose as a permanent subscription) — plus an explicit unsubscribe chemin. None of que is something vous, as the publisher, manage; it’s the hub-and-subscriber side of the handshake. But it’s worth knowing it exists, parce que it’s pourquoi “I pinged the hub” and “a moteur de recherche has an active subscription to my feed” are two différent, independently-failable choses.

Step 3 is aussi moins standardized que la plupart WebSub write-ups let on: the spec itself dit “the spécifique mechanism pour the publisher to inform the hub is left unspecified,” and seulement notes, as an exemple, que some public hubs — notamment Google’s — accept a POST with hub.mode=publish and hub.url définir to the modifié feed. Que convention is universal suffisant En pratique que “ping the hub” and “POST hub.mode=publish” are effectively synonyms — but it’s a widely-adopted convention documented as an exemple, pas a hard requirement of the Recommendation.

The W3C spec is technically broader que feeds — it peut carry quelconque HTTP resource — but Google’s documentation scopes its recommendation to Atom/RSS feeds. The spec is wide; the SEO utiliser cas is narrow.

WebSub and Google

Google’s prise en charge is on the record, in the Construire a Sitemap docs: “Si vous utiliser Atom or RSS, vous pouvez utiliser WebSub to broadcast votre changements to moteur de recherches, notamment Google.” It’s a unique subordinate sentence — Google doesn’t give WebSub its propre section — but it’s confirmed.

Google’s hub is at pubsubhubbub.appspot.com, run by Google as a service — I confirmed it’s encore live and answering as of 2026-07-18. That’s the hub vous advertise in votre feed and ping on publish. Community hubs exist aussi, but they’ve historically been moins durable que Google’s — vérifier que quelconque third-party hub you’re considering is en réalité encore responding avant vous commit votre feed to it, plutôt que trusting an old blog post que dit it fonctionne.

The robot d’exploration behind the curtain is Feedfetcher (Feedfetcher-Google), qui is how Google crawls RSS/Atom feeds pour Google News and WebSub. Un important nuance from Feedfetcher’s propre docs: “only podcast feeds get indexed in Google Search” via que chemin. So pour a normal blog feed, WebSub accelerates Google’s awareness of the feed mettre à jour, but the réel indexation of chaque page encore comes from Googlebot suivant l’URLs à l’intérieur the feed via the normal explorer → index pipeline. WebSub is a discovery accelerant, pas an indexation shortcut.

WebSub and Bing

Bing’s documented WebSub-style prise en charge has lived sous Bing News PubHub — i.e., it’s news/feed-scoped, parallel to how Google’s Feedfetcher chemin is oriented toward News and podcasts. But PubHub itself is winding bas: Microsoft stopped accepting nouveau publisher applications to PubHub in June 2025, saying it’s moving Bing News toward automatically identifying and ranking eligible news content au lieu de manual submissions. Publishers déjà approved avant alors stay indexé; the submission portal pour nouveau applicants is closed. That’s a program-level retirement of manual news submission, pas a modifier to IndexNow.

Pour pushing general web pages to Bing, the correct outil is IndexNow, pas WebSub or PubHub. IndexNow is Bing’s (and Yandex’s, Naver’s, Seznam’s, Yep’s) preferred real-time push pour arbitrary URLs, unaffected by the PubHub modifier — and notably, Google fait pas participate in IndexNow (confirmed on indexnow.org’s propre participant liste as of ce examiner). So the clean split is: WebSub pour feeds (où Google’s hub is the practical option), IndexNow pour general pages on the engines que prise en charge it.

How to implement WebSub

Step 1 — advertise the hub in votre feed. Ajouter a hub lien and a self lien. The la plupart courant formulaire is embedded in the feed itself:

<link rel="hub" href="https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/" />
<link rel="self" href="https://example.com/feed.xml" />

Google’s hub aussi accepts the equivalent as HTTP réponse headers on the feed requête au lieu de embedded tags — utile si vous don’t contrôler the feed’s XML directement (a third-party feed generator, pour instance):

Link: <https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/>; rel="hub"
Link: <https://example.com/feed.xml>; rel="self"

Soit formulaire indique a subscriber the même chose: qui hub to register with, and ce que ce feed’s propre URL canonique is. Que second partie matters si vous ever déplacer the feed — point the old URL at the nouveau un with an HTTP redirection and, per the spec, a subscriber renewing its lease va follow the redirection and pick up the nouveau hub/self pair automatically, plutôt que silently going stale.

Step 2 — ping the hub quand vous publish. POST to the hub URL with the publish mode and votre feed URL — ce is the widely-used convention Google’s hub (and la plupart others) expect, décrit ci-dessus:

curl -i -d "hub.mode=publish&hub.url=https://example.com/feed.xml" \
  https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/

En pratique, votre CMS handles les deux steps. WordPress’s PubSubHubbub plugin uses Google’s hub by par défaut; Blogger, WordPress.com, and Medium prise en charge WebSub natively. Pour a custom site, vous wire the publish-ping into votre publishing flow.

Vérifier — but know ce que you’re en réalité confirming. A 2xx from the hub seulement proves the hub accepted votre notification; it doesn’t prove quelconque subscriber reçu it, and as the publisher vous généralement can’t observe que dernier hop directement. Ce que vous peut vérifier from votre propre side: publish a tester post, confirmer the hub renvoie a 2xx to votre ping, alors watch pour Feedfetcher-Google hitting votre feed in votre serveur logs shortly après — que confirms the hub re-fetched, qui is as far as publisher-side verification goes. Voir the Validation Tests lens pour the complet staged breakdown (feed markup, ping réponse, hub re-fetch) with ce que chaque un fait and doesn’t prove.

Ce que WebSub is pas

A few myths worth killing:

  • It ne fait pas index pages instantly. It notifies the hub of a feed mettre à jour; Google encore crawls and indexes chaque URL via normal processes.
  • It ne fait pas fonctionner pour arbitrary pages. Feeds seulement. Pour non-feed URLs, that’s IndexNow (Bing) or Inspection d’URL (Google).
  • It ne fait pas replace sitemaps. WebSub and sitemaps are complementary — sitemaps cover the whole site; WebSub pushes real-time feed changements. Google recommends les deux.
  • Google’s hub n’est pas deprecated. pubsubhubbub.appspot.com is active and run by Google — confirmed live as of 2026-07-18. Bing’s PubHub is a différent story: it stopped taking nouveau publisher applications in June 2025 (voir WebSub and Bing ci-dessus), so don’t treat que page as an onboarding chemin anymore même though it encore exists.

Who en réalité benefits

High-frequency publishers — news sites, podcasts, and anyone whose freshness window matters — obtenir the la plupart out of WebSub. Pour a site que publishes a few times a month, the marginal speed-up over normal feed polling and bon maillage interne is petit. It’s a sensible par défaut si votre platform offers it; it’s rarely worth heavy custom engineering on its propre.

Pour the broader picture of how URLs obtenir trouvé, voir the Discovery hub; pour ce que se produit après a URL is découvert, voir Exploration.

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