SEO Optional Updated 2026-05-29

IndexNow

An open protocol for telling participating search engines that a URL has changed. One HTTP request pushes Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam to recrawl — Google does not participate.

What it is

IndexNow is a simple push protocol that lets a site tell search engines a URL has been added, updated, or deleted. The publisher hosts a key file at the site root and sends an HTTP request to a participating endpoint listing the changed URLs. Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, and Yep all consume the same feed; one submission propagates to all of them. Google does not participate.

The submission is a single GET or POST:

POST /indexnow HTTP/1.1
Host: api.indexnow.org
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "host": "example.com",
  "key": "abc123...xyz",
  "keyLocation": "https://example.com/abc123xyz.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://example.com/articles/csp",
    "https://example.com/articles/hsts"
  ]
}

The key file at https://example.com/abc123xyz.txt must contain the same key as plain text — that proves you control the host.

Why it matters

Discovery is the slowest part of indexing. A sitemap tells crawlers what exists; IndexNow tells them what just changed. For news, e-commerce stock changes, and price updates, that gap matters — Bing typically recrawls within minutes of an IndexNow ping versus hours or days from sitemap-only discovery.

It is also a low-effort improvement. A single endpoint covers every participating engine, no per-engine integrations needed.

Google’s absence is the limiting factor. If most of your traffic is from Google, IndexNow is a nice-to-have. For markets where Bing, Yandex, or Naver have meaningful share (Russia, South Korea, the Czech Republic, US Bing-driven verticals), the impact is real.

How to implement

The shape is straightforward:

Generate a key. 8 to 128 characters, [a-zA-Z0-9-]. Pick one and reuse it indefinitely.
Host the key file at the site root. https://example.com/<key>.txt, served as text/plain, body equal to the key.
Submit URLs on change. Fire a request to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow (or directly to Bing’s or Yandex’s endpoint) after every publish, update, or unpublish event.
Limit volume. Up to 10,000 URLs per request. Do not send the entire sitemap on every cron tick — submit only what changed since the last call.
Send deletions too. A 404 or 410 should also be submitted; that is how participating engines learn to drop URLs quickly.

A small wrapper around your CMS publish hook is usually enough. Many SEO plugins (including Yoast) submit automatically.

Common mistakes

Submitting URLs that return non-200 statuses you did not mean to publish.
Re-submitting on every page view rather than only on change.
Hosting the key file at the wrong path or behind redirects. The key file must return 200 directly.
Treating IndexNow as a Google signal. Google ignores the protocol — use Search Console’s URL Inspection tool for one-off Google submissions.

Verification

curl https://example.com/<key>.txt should return the key as plain text.
The endpoint returns 200 OK on accepted submissions, 202 if quarantined, and 400/403/422 on errors. Log the response.
Bing Webmaster Tools shows IndexNow activity under “URL Submission” — confirm the URLs appear there.