Crawling is a polling system. Search engines guess how often to revisit your pages, and they are often wrong in both directions — hammering pages that never change, ignoring pages that just did.
IndexNow inverts this: you notify the engine when a URL is added, updated, or deleted.
How it works
- Generate a key — a random hex string of 8 to 128 characters.
- Host it as a text file at your site root:
https://example.com/{key}.txt, containing the key as its only content. POSTa JSON payload listing changed URLs to an IndexNow endpoint.
{
"host": "example.com",
"key": "a1b2c3d4e5f6...",
"keyLocation": "https://example.com/a1b2c3d4e5f6....txt",
"urlList": [
"https://example.com/blog/new-post.html",
"https://example.com/blog/updated-post.html"
]
}Participating engines share submissions with each other, so a single POST reaches all of them.
Who actually consumes it
Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Seznam, and Naver are the confirmed participants. Bing is the one that matters for most Western sites, and Bing has been the most vocal advocate.
Google's position is the part that gets misreported. Google has run its own experiments with the protocol and has not committed to using IndexNow as a general-purpose indexing signal for the open web. Anyone telling you IndexNow speeds up Google indexing is claiming more than the public record supports.
That said, Bing's index is not just Bing. It feeds DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and — significantly — has been part of the retrieval infrastructure behind several AI search products. Faster inclusion in Bing has more downstream reach than its direct search share suggests.
Where it genuinely helps
Publishing sites with a real cadence. News, blogs, anything where content has a freshness window. Getting indexed hours rather than days after publication is the difference between catching a topic and missing it.
E-commerce with volatile inventory. Price and availability changes reaching the index faster reduces the window where a search result advertises something you cannot sell.
Large sites with slow discovery. If new URLs take a long time to be found, push notification bypasses the discovery problem entirely for the engines that honor it.
Deletions. Telling an engine a URL is gone is faster than waiting for it to re-crawl and find a 404.
Where it does nothing
IndexNow is a discovery accelerator, not a quality signal. It tells an engine a URL changed. It does not make the engine index the URL, and it does not affect ranking.
If pages are not being indexed because they are thin, duplicative, or judged low quality, IndexNow changes nothing — you will simply get told faster that they are not being indexed. The Search Console exclusion reason "Crawled – currently not indexed" is a quality signal, and no push protocol addresses it.
Implementation notes
Automate it at the publish event. A manual submission workflow will be abandoned within a month. Hook it to the same event that regenerates your sitemap.
Only submit real changes. Submitting your entire URL list daily is spam behavior and providers may deprioritize or ignore your key. Submit what changed.
Rate limits exist. Bing documents limits per host per day. A normal publishing cadence will not approach them; a misconfigured loop will.
Verify the key file is reachable. A 404 on the key file silently invalidates every submission. Worth a check in your deploy pipeline.
Many platforms handle this already — Cloudflare offers automatic IndexNow submission, and several CMS plugins implement it. Using an existing integration is the sensible default; the protocol is simple enough that a custom implementation is a few dozen lines when you need one.
The honest cost-benefit
Implementation is maybe an hour if you are automating from an existing publish hook. The benefit is faster indexing in Bing and its downstream consumers, no effect on Google, no effect on ranking anywhere.
That is a good trade for publishers and e-commerce sites. It is close to irrelevant for a ten-page brochure site that changes twice a year. Size the effort accordingly, and be skeptical of anyone presenting it as a growth tactic — it is plumbing, and plumbing is worth exactly what plumbing is worth.