What is IndexNow?

The short version

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website tell participating search engines "this URL just changed" instead of waiting for a crawler to come back and notice. You make one HTTP request listing the URLs; the engines are told immediately.

It was introduced by Microsoft and Yandex in October 2021 and is free to use. There is no account, no dashboard and no approval process — you prove you control the domain by hosting a key file, and then you can submit.

Why it exists

Crawling is expensive. A search engine has to guess how often each site changes and allocate a crawl budget accordingly. Big, frequently updated sites get visited constantly; a small business site might get looked at once a fortnight. That guesswork wastes the engine's bandwidth on unchanged pages and leaves genuinely new content undiscovered.

IndexNow flips it around. Rather than the engine guessing, the site says so. It costs the engine almost nothing and it removes the delay for you.

Which search engines support it?

Submitting to the shared endpoint at api.indexnow.org forwards your URLs to every participating engine at once. Today that means:

• Bing — the original implementer, and the one most people care about
• Yandex — co-founder of the protocol
• Seznam.cz — the dominant engine in the Czech Republic
• Naver — the dominant engine in South Korea
• Yep — Ahrefs' search engine
• Amazon — via Amazonbot

What about Google?

Google does not use IndexNow. It ran a trial and has said it is evaluating the protocol, but as things stand your Google indexing is unaffected. Anyone selling you IndexNow as a way to rank on Google faster is overselling it.

That said, Bing powers more than you might think — Bing results feed DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and, importantly, several AI assistants including Copilot and parts of ChatGPT's web browsing. Being fresh in Bing's index increasingly matters for AI answers, not just for Bing's own search page.

How it works, technically

There are three moving parts.

1. A key

You generate a random string between 8 and 128 characters, using only letters, digits and hyphens. This is your API key. There is no registration — you invent it.

2. A key file on your site

You put that key in a plain text file named {yourkey}.txt at the root of your site, containing the key and nothing else. This is how you prove ownership: only someone who controls the site could put a file there.

Note that the file must be on the same host as the URLs you submit. example.com and www.example.com count as different hosts, and so does every subdomain — each needs its own copy of the file.

3. A submission

For a single URL, a GET request is enough:

https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://example.com/page&key=yourkey

For up to 10,000 URLs at a time, POST JSON:

POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{
  "host": "example.com",
  "key": "yourkey",
  "keyLocation": "https://example.com/yourkey.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://example.com/page-one",
    "https://example.com/page-two"
  ]
}

What the responses mean

The rules people break

The protocol is easy to implement badly, and doing so can get your domain throttled.

• Don't resubmit the same URL repeatedly. The guidance is to leave at least five minutes between updates to a given URL, and to submit only when content has genuinely changed — not on every deploy or cache clear.
• Don't submit your whole sitemap every night. A common mistake: a script that dumps every URL daily. It burns quota, tells the engines nothing useful, and looks like abuse.
• Don't submit cosmetic changes. A CSS tweak or a footer year update is not a content change.
• Don't submit URLs on a host your key doesn't cover. One stray absolute URL pointing at a CDN or the www variant will reject the whole batch.

What IndexNow does not do

Submitting a URL is a notification, not an instruction. It does not guarantee the page will be indexed, and it has no effect on where you rank. If a page is thin, duplicated, blocked by robots.txt or carries a noindex, telling an engine about it faster changes nothing. IndexNow removes the discovery delay — that's all, and that's still worth having.

Is it worth setting up?

If you publish or change content regularly — a blog, a shop with changing stock and prices, a jobs board, a news site — yes. The gap between publishing and being discovered is the part you can actually control, and this closes it.

If your site is five static pages that change once a year, the benefit is marginal. Be honest with yourself about which one you are.

Doing it yourself vs having it done

Implementing the submission call is an afternoon's work. Keeping it correct is the ongoing part: detecting what actually changed, batching under the 10,000 limit, honouring rate limits and Retry-After, retrying failures, keeping the key file alive through redesigns, and having a log when something breaks silently.

That's the work Index-now does. You upload one file; we handle the rest for $12 per domain per year.

Set up automatic IndexNow submission →