IndexNow is a free, open protocol that lets your site tell search engines a page changed. Normally you publish and wait for a crawler to come back around, which can take days. With IndexNow, your site sends a short ping with the URL, and the engine moves it up its list.
Bing created it with Yandex in 2021 and is the engine that matters most here. Microsoft Copilot answers from Bing, and ChatGPT search draws on Bing’s index alongside OpenAI’s own. When Bing picks up your changes sooner, so do the AI answers built on it.
Google is the exception. It has tested IndexNow for years and never adopted it, so for Google your levers are still your sitemap and Search Console. Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Yep, and Amazon also act on IndexNow, and a ping to one is shared with all of them.
Why freshness matters to AI answers
Say you change your pricing, publish a new case study, or fix a wrong claim on your About page. An AI answer about you only reflects that once the engine has the new version. Without IndexNow, that waits on Bingbot’s next visit. With it, Bing hears about the change when you publish.
Check whether it’s already on
Plenty of sites already send IndexNow without knowing it, because their CDN or SEO plugin does it for them. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and open IndexNow Insights. It lists the URLs Bing received through IndexNow and where each one came from, such as Cloudflare, a plugin, or a manual submission.
If your recent pages are there, you’re set. If the list is empty, turn it on with one of the options below.
An outside scan, including ours, can only look for a key at a conventional path like /indexnow.txt. Plugins and CDNs keep their keys elsewhere, so a scan that can’t find your key doesn’t mean IndexNow is off. Bing Webmaster Tools has the real answer.
Turn on what your platform already has
Most sites never need to write IndexNow code. Your platform handles the key and the pings:
- Cloudflare: turn on Crawler Hints on the Caching → Configuration page. It’s available on every plan, including Free, and pings IndexNow when Cloudflare sees a page change.
- WordPress: turn on Rank Math’s Instant Indexing module (free), keep the IndexNow setting on in Yoast SEO Premium (on by default), or activate the IndexNow addon in All in One SEO Pro. Each one creates and hosts the key and pings on publish and update.
- Wix, Duda, and GoDaddy’s website builder: built in, with nothing to set up. On Wix it needs a Premium plan.
- Shopify: install an IndexNow app from the Shopify App Store.
- Drupal, PrestaShop, Shopware, OpenCart, TYPO3, and Umbraco: install an IndexNow extension. Bing’s get started page links one for each.
One integration per site is enough. If you’re on Cloudflare and WordPress, pick either.
Set it up yourself
If nothing you use supports it, like a custom or statically generated site, add it to your publish pipeline in three steps.
1. Generate a key. A string of 8 to 128 characters: letters, numbers, and dashes. Host it in a text file at your domain root, named after the key:
https://www.example.com/a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6.txt
The file contains only the key. Hosting it proves you control the domain.
2. Submit a single URL with a GET request:
https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://www.example.com/new-page&key=a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6
3. Or submit many at once with a POST (up to 10,000 URLs per request):
POST /indexnow HTTP/1.1
Host: api.indexnow.org
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
{
"host": "www.example.com",
"key": "a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6",
"keyLocation": "https://www.example.com/a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6.txt",
"urlList": [
"https://www.example.com/new-page",
"https://www.example.com/updated-page"
]
}
Fire the submission from your CMS or deploy step whenever a page goes live or changes. Then publish something and confirm it shows up in IndexNow Insights.
Submit real changes only
Ping a URL when its content changed, and only then. Resubmitting unchanged pages won’t move you up, and engines treat a flood of them as potential spam and start refusing your requests. Used that way, IndexNow does one thing well: it gets your latest version in front of Bing, and the AI answers that read from it, without the wait.
