LLM Best Practices

How to submit a new site to search engines

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Overview

A new site with no inbound links can sit undiscovered for a long time; submit it explicitly instead of waiting for a crawler to stumble on it. This page is phase 5 of the zero-to-indexed launch runbook and covers the three registrations a launch needs: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and IndexNow.

Run it only after the site is live on its final domain with a valid certificate and a sitemap.xml at the root (see Point a custom domain at GitHub Pages and Sitemaps). Submitting a sitemap that lists *.github.io URLs, or one that 404s, wastes the first crawl.

Verify Google Search Console and submit the sitemap there

Verify the property with a DNS TXT record (a Domain property covers every protocol and subdomain) or with the GSC-provided HTML method. Then:

  1. Submit sitemap.xml in the Sitemaps report.
  2. URL-inspect the homepage and click Request indexing.

The old google.com/ping?sitemap= endpoint was deprecated at the end of 2023 and no longer works. The Sitemaps report and the Sitemap: line in robots.txt are the supported paths. Full walkthrough: Master Google Search Console.

Import the property into Bing Webmaster Tools

Verify in Bing Webmaster Tools, then submit the sitemap. The fastest verification is import from Google Search Console, which carries the property and sitemap across in one step. Bing also exposes a URL Submission API for direct push. Bing registration matters beyond Bing search itself: Bingbot serves both Bing and Copilot, so the Bing index is where Copilot grounding starts.

Deploy an IndexNow key and automate the pings

Deploy the key file at the site root and submit the key. IndexNow notifies the participating engines (Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep), and they share submissions with each other. Google does not consume IndexNow, so treat it as additive coverage; for Google, rely on the sitemap, GSC, and organic crawl.

# key file served at https://example.com/<key>.txt containing <key>
curl "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://example.com/new-page&key=<key>"

Automate this step. A post-deploy hook that pings IndexNow with the changed URLs means nobody hand-submits again. Setup details and the batch POST format: IndexNow.

Confirm pickup over the following days

Check back rather than assuming. In GSC, the Sitemaps report should show Success, and pages should move into Indexed in the Pages report over the following days. In Bing Webmaster Tools, the sitemap status and URL Inspection show the same. Pages stuck in “Discovered, currently not indexed” point at a quality or crawl budget problem, not a submission problem.

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