What is IndexNow?

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website notify search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for them to crawl it. Microsoft Bing and Yandex launched it in 2021. One ping is shared with every participating engine. Google does not use IndexNow.

Which search engines support IndexNow?

The participants listed on indexnow.org are Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz and Yep, plus the Internet Archive and Amazonbot. A submission to any one of them is shared with the others. Since Bing’s index also feeds other products that search the web through it, faster Bing indexing can matter beyond Bing itself.

How does IndexNow work?

1. Generate a key (a string of 8 to 128 letters, numbers or dashes).
2. Host it as a text file at your site root, for example https://example.com/<key>.txt, containing the key. This proves you own the site.
3. Send changed URLs to an IndexNow endpoint, one at a time or up to 10,000 in a single POST.

https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://example.com/new-page&key=YOUR_KEY

Does IndexNow guarantee indexing?

No. It tells engines a URL changed; each engine still decides whether and when to crawl and index it. It also does not replace an XML sitemap, which is still how Google finds your URLs.

Example

A news site publishes a story and its CMS pings IndexNow within seconds. Bing can crawl the story right away instead of finding it on its next pass. Many CMS plugins and CDNs send these pings automatically. SEO Rank Fixer can submit your sitemap’s URLs through IndexNow once you publish the key file.