Normally you publish a page and wait for crawlers to come find it, which can take days. IndexNow flips that: the moment you publish or change a page, you ping the engines and tell them to come look. It turns freshness from a waiting game into a notification.
What it is
IndexNow is an open protocol for instant URL submission. You tell participating engines “this URL just changed,” and they prioritize fetching it. It launched in October 2021 as a Bing and Yandex collaboration and is free to use.
One thing to be clear about up front: Google does not use IndexNow. It has been testing the protocol for years but has not adopted it. So IndexNow is real and useful, just not for speeding up Google. The engines that act on it include Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Yep, and Amazon, and Cloudflare offers one-click enablement for sites on its network. For Google, your levers are still the sitemap and Search Console.
Why AI engines care
Several AI answer engines draw on Bing’s index. Getting your changes into Bing quickly means your latest content, your updated proof, your new pages, is available to the systems that lean on that index, sooner. It is the fast path that complements your sitemap’s steady one.
How to set it up
There are three steps.
1. Generate a key. A string of 8 to 128 hex-style characters. Host it in a text file at your domain root, named after the key itself:
https://www.example.com/a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6.txtThe file’s only content is the key. Hosting it proves you control the domain.
2. Submit a single URL with a simple GET request:
https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://www.example.com/new-page&key=a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d63. 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"
]
}Submitting to one participating endpoint shares the URL with all the others, so you only need to ping once. The best setup automates this: have your CMS or publish pipeline fire a submission whenever a page goes live or changes.
Submit real changes only
IndexNow is for real changes, not a nudge to re-rank. Pinging unchanged pages, or spamming submissions, helps nothing and can get your submissions discounted. Submit a URL when its content genuinely changed, and let it do its one job: make your freshness show up fast.