What is IndexNow?

How it works

1. Generate a key, a string of 8 to 128 letters, numbers, and dashes.
2. Host the key in a text file at your site root, for example https://example.com/6f1c2a9e4b7d.txt, containing only the key. This proves you control the site.
3. Submit URLs when content changes. A single URL can be sent as a simple GET request:

https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://example.com/new-post/&key=6f1c2a9e4b7d

For many URLs at once, send a POST with JSON:

{
  "host": "example.com",
  "key": "6f1c2a9e4b7d",
  "urlList": [
    "https://example.com/new-post/",
    "https://example.com/updated-guide/"
  ]
}

A 200 or 202 response means the submission was received. It does not mean the URLs will be crawled or indexed immediately, or at all; the search engine still decides.

When it is useful

• Sites that change often: news, job listings, events, stores with changing stock and prices.
• Deletions: submitting a removed URL prompts a recrawl, so the engine sees the 404 or 410 sooner.
• Sites where Bing matters. Bing's index also feeds other products, so faster Bing discovery can have wider reach.

For a small site that publishes a few posts a month, the gain is modest. Crawlers and sitemaps already find new content in reasonable time.

Setting it up

You rarely need to call the API by hand. Some CDNs, including Cloudflare through its Crawler Hints feature, can send IndexNow notifications for you, and several WordPress plugins do it on publish and update. Bing Webmaster Tools shows the URLs it has received through IndexNow.

Rules worth following:

• Submit only URLs that actually changed, not your whole site on every update.
• Submit canonical URLs, not parameter variants. See canonical URL.
• Keep your sitemap too. IndexNow adds to sitemaps; it does not replace them, and Google relies on sitemaps.