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IndexNow

IndexNow is the open push protocol that instantly tells Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, and Yep when your URLs change — one submission, shared across all of them. How it works, how to set it up, and why it does nothing for Google.

First published: Jun 22, 2026 · Last updated: Jul 18, 2026 · Advanced
demand #4 in Discovery#14 in How Search Works#75 in Technical SEO#99 on the site
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IndexNow is a free, open push protocol from Microsoft Bing and Yandex (launched Oct 18, 2021; also Seznam, Naver, and Yep): you ping participating engines the instant a URL is added, updated, or deleted, and one submission is shared across all of them. Setup is a key file at your root plus a simple HTTP GET (one URL) or POST (up to 10,000). It speeds up discovery and recrawl — it doesn't guarantee indexing and it's not a ranking lever. Google does NOT use IndexNow: it said it would test the protocol in 2021 and never adopted it, so it does nothing for Google. Keep your sitemaps; IndexNow is additive, and the Google Indexing API is a separate, narrow tool.

TL;DR — IndexNow is an open push protocol (Microsoft Bing + Yandex, launched Oct 18, 2021; joined by Seznam, Naver, and Yep). You host a {key}.txt file at your root for verification, then notify engines on add/update/delete via a GET (one URL) or a JSON POST (≤10,000 URLs). The differentiator is the shared ping — submit once, reach every participant. It accelerates discovery and recrawl prioritization; it does not guarantee indexing and is not a ranking signal. Google does not use IndexNow — it said in Nov 2021 it would “be testing” the protocol and never adopted it, so it does nothing for Google. Keep your sitemaps; the Google Indexing API is a separate, narrow tool.

Evidence for this claim IndexNow is a push protocol for notifying participating search engines that URLs were added, updated, or deleted; notification does not guarantee crawling or indexing. Scope: Current IndexNow protocol documentation. Confidence: high · Verified: IndexNow protocol documentation Evidence for this claim Participating engines share submitted IndexNow URLs; Google is not listed as a participating IndexNow search engine. Scope: Current IndexNow participant documentation, distinct from Google's narrow Indexing API. Confidence: high · Verified: IndexNow: Participating search engines

What IndexNow actually is

IndexNow is the push side of URL discovery. Most discovery is pull — engines follow links and read your sitemap on their own schedule. IndexNow lets you proactively tell participating engines that something changed so they can prioritize the (re)crawl. Bing’s own framing: “Whether you’re adding, updating, or deleting content, IndexNow notifies multiple search engines of your content changes as soon as they happen.”

It was launched October 18, 2021 by Microsoft Bing and Yandex, and it’s a free, open protocol — “a free, open-source protocol empowering website owners with unprecedented control over how quickly their content is discovered,” in Bing’s words. The protocol spec lives at indexnow.org.

Who participates (and who doesn’t)

Participating engines today: Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz, and Yep (Ahrefs’ search engine) — that’s the list indexnow.org’s homepage credits as offering support. Because Bing powers a chunk of the AI-search ecosystem, feeding Bing’s index via IndexNow can also help visibility on Copilot, ChatGPT Search, and DuckDuckGo.

As of my July 2026 check, indexnow.org’s FAQ also lists a submission endpoint for Amazon (indexnow.amazonbot.amazon) alongside Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, and Yandex — but the homepage’s own “support from” line hasn’t been updated to include it. I’d treat Amazon’s participation as newly emerging rather than fully confirmed until the site is internally consistent about it.

Participating also isn’t a promise to crawl or index what you send: indexnow.org’s own spec is explicit that engines “agree that submitted URLs will be automatically shared” with every other participant — sharing the ping, not committing to act on it.

Google is not on that list. More on that below — it’s the single most misunderstood thing about this protocol.

How it works

There are four moving parts: a key, a key file, the submission, and the shared ping.

1. Generate a key

A key is a hexadecimal string (the spec allows 8–128 characters: a–z, A–Z, 0–9, and dashes). It’s what ties your submissions to your domain. Bing: “An API key is needed to match the ownership of the domain with submitted URLs.”

2. Host the key file (verification)

Place a UTF-8 text file named {your-key}.txt, containing the key, at your site root (or another location you declare via keyLocation). Engines fetch it to confirm you control the host before they accept anything. Bing: “Host your UTF-8 key file at the root of your website.” The indexnow.org spec: the key file is how “search engines use this file to confirm domain ownership before accepting IndexNow submissions.” This is the whole authentication model — there’s no OAuth, no service account, just a file you can serve.

If you use a non-root keyLocation, its path also scopes which URLs that key can cover — this is a detail people miss. Per the indexnow.org spec: “the location of a key file determines the set of URLs that can be included with this key.” A key file at example.com/catalog/key.txt can submit URLs under /catalog/ but not under /help/. Root placement avoids this limit entirely, which is why the spec calls it the “strongly recommended” option.

3. Submit URLs — GET (single) or POST (bulk)

For one URL, a plain HTTP GET is enough:

https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url={url-changed}&key={your-key}

For many URLs, a single JSON POST carries up to 10,000 of them (“IndexNow supports bulk submission of up to 10,000 URLs per POST request.”):

{
  "host": "www.example.org",
  "key": "your-key",
  "keyLocation": "https://www.example.org/your-key.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://www.example.org/url1",
    "https://www.example.org/folder/url2"
  ]
}

Beyond the 10,000-per-POST cap, indexnow.org doesn’t publish a fixed daily URL quota — its FAQ says plainly that it “does not publicly disclose exact rate limits, as each participating search engine sets its own daily submission thresholds per site.” In practice, the only quota signal you’ll see is a 429 response, not a documented number to plan around.

The protocol’s documented response codes are worth knowing when you’re debugging: 200 OK (submitted successfully), 202 Accepted (received, but — per indexnow.org’s spec — “IndexNow key validation pending”, which the FAQ says typically shows up only on your first submission with a new key, before subsequent requests settle back to 200), 400 (bad request / invalid format), 403 Forbidden (key not valid, or the file is found but the key isn’t in it), 422 (URLs don’t belong to the host, or the key schema doesn’t match), and 429 (too many requests — treated as potential spam). Bing’s own get-started page lists the same set minus 202.

4. The shared ping — submit once, reach every participant

This is the feature that makes IndexNow worth the trouble. From the spec: “Each endpoint sends your submission directly to its respective search engine, and your submission will be shared across all IndexNow-enabled search engines.” You can hit the global endpoint, api.indexnow.org, or any participant’s endpoint (Bing’s, Yandex’s, etc.) — the effect is the same. One submission propagates to all of them. You don’t maintain a separate integration per engine.

Does Google use IndexNow?

No. This is the part most pages on the web get wrong or leave vague, so I want to be exact about it.

Google’s only substantive public statement came in November 2021, to Search Engine Land. A Google spokesperson said: “We’re encouraged by work to make web crawling more efficient, and we will be testing the potential benefits of this protocol.” Note the framing — it’s about crawl efficiency and testing, not a commitment to adopt. Search Engine Journal reported the same statement the same day under a “will be testing” headline.

Years later, nothing has changed. Google never adopted IndexNow. Yoast, who build an official IndexNow-capable plugin, put Google’s stance plainly: “Google is not currently participating in this initiative, citing its very efficient crawling mechanism and its continued improvement.” Wikipedia’s entry likewise notes that as of 2022 Google had not officially adopted the protocol — and it still hasn’t.

So: submitting to IndexNow does nothing for Google indexing or rankings. Don’t conflate this with Google’s separate crawl-efficiency work (Gary Illyes’ “crawl less” push) — that’s about Google crawling its own way more efficiently, not about adopting IndexNow as the mechanism. For Google, your discovery channels remain links, sitemaps (with accurate lastmod), RSS/feeds, and WebSub — the push and pull mechanisms I walk through on my How Search Works deck. IndexNow simply isn’t one of them.

IndexNow vs sitemaps vs the Google Indexing API

People reach for IndexNow expecting it to replace something. It doesn’t. These are three different tools with three different jobs:

IndexNowXML SitemapsGoogle Indexing API
ModelPush (notify on change)Pull (engines crawl on schedule)Push (notify Google)
EnginesBing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Yep (shared)All engines, incl. GoogleGoogle only
Content scopeAll content typesAll content typesOnly JobPosting + BroadcastEvent (livestream)
SpeedNear-instant on participantsDays to weeks to be discoveredNear-instant for eligible content
Limit≤10,000 URLs per POST (no published daily cap)≤50,000 URLs per file~200 publish requests/day (default)
SetupKey file at root + HTTPXML file referenced in robots.txt / GSCCloud project + service account
Google effectNoneYesYes — but only the two allowed schema types

The takeaways I’d want you to leave with:

  • They’re complementary, not substitutes. Keep your sitemaps — that’s how Google and everyone else discovers you at scale. Use IndexNow to accelerate discovery on Bing/Yandex/Naver/Seznam/Yep.
  • The Google Indexing API is not “Google’s IndexNow.” It’s officially limited to job postings and livestream video — “Google’s Indexing API officially only supports two content types,” as CrawlWP puts it. The “instant indexing” plugins that fire it at ordinary pages are off-policy.
  • For Google, there is no public push API for ordinary pages. Sitemaps plus good crawl health is the path.

Benefits and limits

The efficiency story is the honest pitch. The canonical justification is Cloudflare’s observation that “53% of this crawler traffic is wasted” — engines re-crawling pages that didn’t change. IndexNow attacks exactly that waste by telling engines when to come back instead of making them guess. Bing frames the upside as helping “drive more relevant traffic to your site, improve search engine rankings, and lower crawl costs,” and in 2025 described IndexNow as “becoming foundational to the way search engines keep pace with web changes.”

Where it genuinely helps:

  • Fast-changing or time-sensitive content — news, ecommerce inventory and pricing, press releases, anything where minutes matter on Bing.
  • Bing-fed AI surfaces — Copilot, ChatGPT Search, DuckDuckGo all lean on Bing’s index.

Where it doesn’t:

  • Google — zero effect, full stop.
  • Rankings — it speeds discovery, not position. Faster crawling ≠ higher ranking.
  • Guaranteed indexing — it’s a prioritization signal; the engine still decides whether and when to index.

Adoption has grown fast — Bing reported “more than 16 million web sites… publishing over 1.2 billion URLs per day” in August 2022, and “3.5 billion URLs submitted per day” by December 2024, with adopters including Shopify, GoDaddy, the Internet Archive, and Condé Nast. (Any larger 2026 figures you see floating around are secondary-sourced; I’d treat them as estimates until Bing publishes a fresh number.)

How to set it up (you probably won’t write code)

Most people never touch the raw API — a platform does it for you:

  • Cloudflare — one click. Enable Crawler Hints (Cache → Configuration) and “Cloudflare will take care of signaling to these search engines when your content has changed via the IndexNow protocol.” This was the first big one-click integration, shipped on launch day.
  • WordPress — Yoast SEO Premium (it “will ping IndexNow whenever you publish or update your content”), Rank Math, All in One SEO, or Microsoft’s official IndexNow plugin.
  • Wix, Duda, Shopify — built-in support.
  • Bing Webmaster Tools — manual URL submission tied to IndexNow, plus the IndexNow Insights report.
  • Ahrefs Site Audit — the integration I built (see the Tools tab). Generate a key in the crawl config, drop it in the key file, and submit the pages Site Audit flags as changed, redirected, or removed.

If you are rolling your own, see the Scripts tab for the actual GET and POST calls and the key-file setup.

Common myths

  • “IndexNow gets you indexed in Google / boosts Google rankings.” False. Google doesn’t consume IndexNow.
  • “Faster indexing means higher rankings.” False. IndexNow speeds discovery; ranking still depends on the usual factors.
  • “Google is about to adopt it.” Not supported. It tested it in 2021 and never adopted it; its later crawl-efficiency work is unrelated.
  • “IndexNow replaces sitemaps.” False. Sitemaps remain essential, especially for Google. IndexNow is additive.
  • “The Indexing API is Google’s IndexNow for any page.” False — JobPosting + BroadcastEvent only.
  • “It guarantees indexing.” False. It’s a prioritization signal.

Where this sits in the bigger picture

IndexNow is the cross-engine push analog of the feed mechanisms Google uses (RSS, WebSub) — same idea (“tell me what changed”), different participants. It lives in the getting-pages-discovered-faster corner of crawling, alongside the Google Indexing API. For the full pipeline — how discovery, crawling, rendering, and indexing fit together — see the Crawling hub and the How Search Works cluster page.

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