IndexNow is a protocol that lets a site ping participating search engines when URLs change, instead of waiting for crawlers to notice. A submission to one participating engine is shared with the others. Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and Yep are among the engines that have adopted it. Google has not adopted IndexNow, so it does not replace sitemaps or Google's own discovery.
How it works
You generate a key, host it as a text file at your site's root to prove ownership, and send an HTTP request listing the changed URLs. Single URLs can go in a GET request; batches of URLs go in a JSON POST. The engine may then crawl those URLs sooner, though it is not obliged to crawl or index them.
POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow
Content-Type: application/json
{
"host": "www.example.com",
"key": "your-key",
"keyLocation": "https://www.example.com/your-key.txt",
"urlList": [
"https://www.example.com/blog/new-post",
"https://www.example.com/pricing"
]
}Why it is worth setting up
Bing's index feeds Microsoft's own search and Copilot products, and other AI products have been reported to use Bing results, though not all of them document their sources. Getting changed pages recrawled quickly on Bing can matter for freshness there. Many CMSs, CDNs and SEO plugins offer IndexNow with a toggle.
What it does not do
IndexNow is a hint, not a guarantee. It does not affect Google. It also does not help pages with quality or crawlability problems. Only submit URLs that actually changed; pinging every URL on every deploy adds noise and may be ignored.
Example
Pinging on publish
Tidewell adds a CMS webhook so that when an editor publishes or updates a post, the URL is sent to the IndexNow endpoint. Bing Webmaster Tools shows the submissions and the time they were crawled, and the team keeps sitemaps for Google as before.
Common mistakes
Expecting Google to use it
Google does not participate. Keep XML sitemaps and internal links for Google discovery.
Submitting unchanged URLs in bulk
Mass submissions of pages that did not change waste the signal. Send only real updates.
Questions
No. Participating engines share submissions with each other, so one ping to any of them, or to api.indexnow.org, is enough.
