Indexing shouldn't need an engineer

IndexNow is a genuinely good idea: instead of a search engine guessing when to come back and look at your site, your site tells it the moment something changed. It's free, it's open, and it works.

The trouble is that "it works" assumes somebody builds and maintains the plumbing. Somebody has to detect what changed, decide which URLs deserve a submission, batch them under the protocol's limits, handle the rate limiting, retry the failures, and notice when the whole thing quietly stopped working six weeks ago. That's not hard, exactly — it's just never anybody's priority.

So most sites do one of two things. They install a plugin that fires off every URL on every save, which wastes quota and eventually gets throttled. Or they do nothing at all and wait for the crawler, which is the situation IndexNow was invented to fix.

What we do

We run that plumbing as a service. You prove you own the domain once — the protocol requires it and we can't do it for you — and after that we watch your sitemap, work out what actually changed, and submit it properly. Every batch is logged with the real response from the search engines, because a service you can't verify is a service you're just trusting.

What we don't do

We don't promise rankings. IndexNow is a discovery mechanism, not a ranking factor — it gets your page looked at sooner, and nothing more. We also don't claim to affect Google, because Google doesn't participate in the protocol. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something they can't deliver.

Pricing, and why it's so cheap

$12 per domain per year. This is infrastructure, not a growth product: it should cost about what a domain renewal costs and then get out of your way. There's no free tier because the setup support per domain is real, and there's no enterprise tier because there's nothing extra to sell you.

The name

To be explicit, since it comes up: IndexNow is an open protocol operated by Microsoft and Yandex. We are an independent service that submits to it on our customers' behalf. We are not affiliated with the IndexNow project, Microsoft, Yandex or any search engine.

Get in touch

Questions about setup, the protocol, or whether this is worth it for your site — [email protected]. A person reads it.