What is IndexNow?

IndexNow, explained

Normally search engines find changes by recrawling. IndexNow lets you push a notification instead. The IndexNow FAQ lists the participating engines as Bing, Yandex, Naver, Amazon, Seznam.cz and Yep, and states that Google does not participate. A submission to any one participating endpoint is shared with all of them, so you only need to send it once.

Setup is small. You generate a key, host it as a text file at https://yourdomain.com/{key}.txt (or point to another location with keyLocation), and then send changed URLs either one at a time with a GET request or in batches with a JSON POST. The documentation allows up to 10,000 URLs per POST and returns codes like 200 or 202 for success, 403 for an invalid key and 429 for too many requests.

The FAQ is clear that submission doesn't guarantee indexing. Engines still decide whether a page is worth indexing. What IndexNow changes is how quickly they know to look. Only submit URLs that actually changed; pinging your whole site every day wastes the signal.

Many CMSs and CDNs have IndexNow built in or available as a plugin. On a custom stack, a small hook after each publish or deploy is enough: collect the URLs that changed, send one batch, and log the response code so you notice if the key stops validating.

Why it matters for founders

For a new product, getting launch pages into Bing quickly costs one hook in your publish flow. It won't help with Google, so keep your sitemap and internal links in good shape too.

Example

When a new product page goes live, your publish step POSTs its URL to the IndexNow endpoint with your key. Bing's crawler fetches it shortly after, without waiting for its next sitemap read.

Common mistakes

• Expecting IndexNow to speed up Google indexing.
• Submitting every URL on every deploy instead of just changed ones.
• Hosting the key file somewhere the engines can't fetch.
• Treating a 200 response as proof the page will be indexed.