---
title: "IndexNow"
slug: "indexnow"
category: "seo"
tags: ["seo", "indexnow", "crawlability"]
status: "stable"
last_updated: 2026-05-14
summary: "Instant push notification of new and updated URLs to Bing, Yandex, and other participating engines via the IndexNow protocol."
related: ["[[seo/technical]]", "[[seo/content]]", "[[seo/llms-txt]]", "[[seo/crawl-budget]]", "[[seo/glossary]]", "[[seo/audit-checklist]]"]
---

## Overview

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a site push URL changes to participating search engines instead of waiting for them to crawl. A POST to one endpoint reaches Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, and Yep at once. Google does not participate. Ship IndexNow on any site that publishes or updates content faster than once a week.

## IndexNow is push, not pull

Traditional indexing is poll-based: the engine decides when to recrawl. IndexNow inverts that.

- Site publishes or updates a URL.
- Site POSTs the URL list to an IndexNow endpoint.
- Participating engines receive the change within seconds and queue a recrawl within minutes.
- Submitted URLs still go through normal quality and ranking pipelines; submission is not a guarantee of indexing.

IndexNow does not replace a sitemap. Sitemaps remain the authoritative full inventory; IndexNow is the delta channel on top. Both belong on the same site, alongside the canonical and URL hygiene rules in [[seo/technical]]. For sites above 10k URLs, IndexNow also cuts the latency cost of [[seo/crawl-budget]] discovery.

## Bing and Yandex participate; Google does not

The current participant list, in rough order of search-market relevance:

- Bing (and any engine that licenses Bing's index, including DuckDuckGo and Ecosia).
- Yandex.
- Seznam (Czech Republic).
- Naver (South Korea).
- Yep (Brave's index).

Google has publicly declined to join. For Google, rely on Search Console's URL Inspection and on the sitemap's `<lastmod>` plus normal crawl. Do not skip IndexNow because Google is absent; Bing-derived traffic alone justifies the integration, and AI search products (Bing Chat, Perplexity, Copilot) lean on Bing's index.

## Host the key file at the site root

Authentication is by a shared secret served as a static file.

- Generate a random hex string at least 8 and at most 128 characters. UUID without hyphens works.
- Host it at `https://<your-domain>/<key>.txt` with the file contents equal to the key.
- Serve with `Content-Type: text/plain` and a 200 status.

The engine verifies ownership by fetching the key file before honoring submissions. Rotate the key only when it leaks; rotation invalidates pending submissions.

## POST URL lists to the endpoint

Two shapes. The single-URL form is a GET; the batch form is a POST with JSON.

Batch form, up to 10,000 URLs per request:

```bash
curl -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/IndexNow" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "host": "example.com",
    "key": "<your-key>",
    "keyLocation": "https://example.com/<your-key>.txt",
    "urlList": [
      "https://example.com/seo/technical",
      "https://example.com/seo/content"
    ]
  }'
```

Response codes worth wiring into alerting:

- 200 or 202: accepted.
- 400: malformed request. Fix the payload.
- 403: key file missing, wrong contents, or wrong URL.
- 422: URLs do not match the declared host. Filter the list.
- 429: rate-limited. Back off.

## Submit only on real changes

Submitting unchanged URLs trains engines to ignore the channel and risks throttling.

- Submit on publish, on material update, and on delete (so the engine drops the URL).
- Do not submit on every build. Compare against the last-deployed manifest and submit only the diff.
- Pair the trigger with the `last_updated` rule in [[seo/content]]: if the page is not re-dated, it should not be submitted.

Rate limits are not publicly fixed; the practical ceiling is in the low thousands of unique URLs per day per site.

## CMS plugins cover the common case; custom integration covers the rest

For WordPress, Wix, Duda, and Cloudflare-fronted sites, an official plugin or one-click integration ships submissions automatically. For custom stacks (Next.js, Astro, Quartz), wire submission into the deploy step.

- Generate the key once, commit the key file to the repo (or to `static/`).
- After the deploy succeeds, compute the URL diff against the previous build manifest.
- POST the diff to `api.indexnow.org/IndexNow` from CI.
- Log responses; alert on non-2xx for two builds in a row.

## Related

- [[seo/technical]]
- [[seo/content]]
- [[seo/llms-txt]]
- [[seo/glossary]]
- [[seo/audit-checklist]]