IndexNow submission tool

What IndexNow is

Normally, search engines find out a page changed when they next crawl it, which can take days or weeks. IndexNow is an open protocol that lets you tell them straight away: you send a list of changed URLs, and the engines that take part can crawl them sooner.

It was launched by Microsoft Bing and Yandex in 2021. Today the engines that use it include Bing, Yandex, Seznam (popular in the Czech Republic), Naver (South Korea) and Yep. They share submissions with each other, so you only need to send each URL once, to any one of them. This IndexNow tool sends it to api.indexnow.org, the shared endpoint.

Bing's index also feeds other products, including some AI assistants that search the web, so getting changes into Bing quickly can matter more than its search share suggests.

Google doesn't use IndexNow

Google said in 2021 that it would test IndexNow, but it doesn't use it. Submitting here does nothing for Google, and that's fine: Google finds changes through your XML sitemap and its own crawling.

For Google, keep your sitemap up to date with accurate lastmod dates, link to new pages from pages Google already visits, and for an important single page use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to request indexing.

How the key works

The key proves you control the site. You put a text file named after the key at your site's root (for example example.com/abc123.txt) containing only the key. When you submit, the engines fetch that file; if it matches, they accept the URLs.

The key isn't a password. Anyone can read the file, and that's by design: what matters is that only someone who controls your site could have put it there. Keep the same key for as long as you use IndexNow. If you already use a plugin or CDN feature for IndexNow (several WordPress SEO plugins and Cloudflare offer one), you already have a key: paste it instead of making a new one.

Common reasons a key check fails: the file is in the wrong folder, the site shows its 404 page at that address, the file has extra spaces or line breaks (most are fine, but stick to the key alone), or a firewall blocks bots from reading it.

What to submit, and what not to

• Submit new pages, pages you've meaningfully changed, and pages you've deleted or redirected (so engines drop or update them sooner).
• Don't resubmit unchanged pages on a schedule. Engines may slow down or ignore sites that submit the same URLs over and over.
• Don't submit pages that are blocked by robots.txt or marked noindex: they won't be indexed anyway.

Submitting doesn't guarantee indexing or ranking. It gets your changes noticed faster; whether a page is indexed still depends on its quality and the engine's own rules. If you publish often, set up automatic submission through your CMS, a plugin or your CDN, and use this tool for one-off batches and to check your key is working.