IndexNow

How does IndexNow work?#

IndexNow works by having your site send a simple HTTP request — one URL, or a batch of up to 10,000 — to a participating search engine whenever a page is added, updated or deleted, authenticated by a key file you host; that engine then shares the notification with every other participant.

1. 1

   Generate a key and host it

   The key is 8–128 characters of letters, numbers and hyphens. Save it as {key}.txt at your site’s root, containing only the key.

   Your lever: Skip this step if your CMS, SEO plugin or CDN supports IndexNow natively — it manages the key for you.

2. 2

   Something changes on your site

   A new post, a substantive update, a price change, a deleted page or a redirect.

   Your lever: Fire pings from real content changes, never from cosmetic edits.

3. 3

   Your site pings one endpoint

   A GET for a single URL or a JSON POST for a batch, sent to api.indexnow.org or any participant’s endpoint. A 200 means received; a 202 means received with key verification pending.

4. 4

   Participants share it, then decide

   Engines that adopt the protocol “agree that submitted URLs will be automatically shared with all other participating search engines.” Each still decides whether and when to crawl — a ping is a strong hint, not an indexing guarantee.

# One URL (GET) — the submitted URL must be URL-encoded
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" \
  "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fpricing&key=YOUR_KEY"
 
# A batch of up to 10,000 URLs (POST)
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  -d '{
    "host": "www.example.com",
    "key": "YOUR_KEY",
    "keyLocation": "https://www.example.com/YOUR_KEY.txt",
    "urlList": [
      "https://www.example.com/pricing",
      "https://www.example.com/blog/new-post"
    ]
  }'
 
# 200 received · 202 received, key check pending · 403 key not found
# 422 URL doesn't match the host or key · 429 too many requests

Which search engines support IndexNow?#

IndexNow’s participants are Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, the Internet Archive and Amazon’s Amazonbot, per the protocol’s published list in September 2026. Google is not a participant, and neither are Brave or Perplexity — the indexes behind Claude’s and Perplexity’s answers.

Microsoft Bing and Yandex introduced the protocol in October 2021. Google said a month later that it would be “testing the potential benefits of this protocol,” but it has never joined the participant list. For Google, keep an XML sitemap with accurate lastmod values and use URL Inspection in Search Console for the few pages that can’t wait.

Does IndexNow help with AI search?#

IndexNow helps AI search mainly through Bing: it gets changed pages recrawled sooner, so Microsoft Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries and the Bing results ChatGPT search can draw on work from your current version. It does nothing for Google’s AI features, Claude or Perplexity.

Microsoft makes the case itself. Its February 2026 post launching AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools says IndexNow “helps keep information fresh across search and AI experiences by notifying participating search engines whenever content is added, updated, or removed.” That matters because AI answers reward content freshness: an answer grounded on last month’s copy of your pricing page quotes last month’s price.

The ChatGPT link is real but partial. OpenAI names Microsoft among its search providers, and independent analysis points to an OpenAI-built index alongside it, so a faster Bing recrawl helps one of ChatGPT’s paths, not all of them. Allowing OAI-SearchBot covers the other.

How do you set up IndexNow?#

Set up IndexNow by first checking whether your CMS, SEO plugin or CDN already supports it — WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Duda do natively or through plugins, and Cloudflare has a native integration — and only otherwise hosting a key file and calling the API from your publishing workflow.

1. Check for built-in support. IndexNow’s FAQ lists WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Duda, Drupal, Joomla and ten other platforms with native or plugin support, plus Cloudflare’s native integration. When the platform handles it, you don’t need a key file at all.
2. Otherwise, generate a key (a UUID works), save it as {key}.txt in the site root, and confirm it loads publicly — no login, firewall or IP rule in front of it.
3. Ping on real changes only: publish, substantive update, price or availability change, deletion and redirect. IndexNow asks sites not to resubmit unchanged URLs and to wait at least five minutes between submissions of the same URL.
4. Keep your sitemap. IndexNow recommends both: pings for what just changed, and a sitemap for the full inventory and for changes made before you started pinging.
5. Log the responses. A run of 403s usually means the key file moved; 429s mean you’ve hit an engine’s rate limit, which none of them publish.

Common mistakes with IndexNow#

The most common IndexNow mistakes are expecting it to reach Google, pinging every URL on every deploy, and reading a 200 response as proof of indexing, when it only confirms the engine received the URL.

Related terms#

• Technical SEOXML sitemapA machine-readable file listing a site’s canonical URLs, optionally with last-modified dates, so search engines can discover pages and prioritize recrawling the ones that changed — a discovery aid, not a ranking factor or a guarantee of indexing.Read the entry
• Content & relevanceContent freshnessHow recently a page was substantively created or updated, which search engines weigh for time-sensitive queries and most AI answer engines appear to weigh even more — the pages they cite are measurably newer than classic search results.Read the entry
• Technical SEOIndexingThe step in which a search engine processes a crawled page and stores it in its searchable database; only indexed pages can rank, or be retrieved for AI answers built on that index, and being crawled does not guarantee being indexed.Read the entry
• Technical SEOCrawl budgetThe number of URLs a search engine is willing and able to crawl on a site in a given period, set by how much load the server can take and how much the engine wants the content — a real constraint mainly for large or fast-changing sites.Read the entry
• GSCMeasurementGoogle Search ConsoleGoogle’s free tool for site owners that reports how a site performs in Google Search — queries, impressions, clicks, position and indexing — and since 2026 it also reports impressions in Google’s generative AI features and lets owners opt out of them.Read the entry