Does WordPress tell Google when I publish a post?

What actually happens when you press Publish

Within a few seconds of publishing, core does the following:

1. Schedules a ping. A background task sends an XML-RPC "weblog updated" message to each address listed under Settings → Writing → Update Services. On a default install that is one line: https://rpc.pingomatic.com/. Ping-O-Matic is a relay that passes the notice on to a list of blog directories and services.
2. Updates the sitemap. The post appears in /wp-sitemap.xml the next time the file is requested, with its last-modified date.
3. Updates the feed at /feed/, and the blog index, category and tag archives that list the post.
4. Sends pingbacks to other sites you linked to in the post, if that setting is on.

None of those is a message to Google Search. The ping feature dates from the blog-directory era and is not part of how Google documents discovery today.

If Discourage search engines is ticked under Settings → Reading, the Update Services box is replaced by a note that WordPress is not notifying any services, and the sitemap is switched off as well.

How Google really finds a new post

Google's documentation describes two discovery routes: following links from pages it already knows, and reading sitemaps. In practice, for a WordPress post:

• Your homepage or blog index is recrawled regularly, and the new post is linked from it. On an active site this is usually the fastest route.
• Your sitemap, once submitted in Search Console or referenced in robots.txt, is fetched on Google's own schedule. WordPress adds a Sitemap: line to its virtual robots.txt automatically.
• Links from other posts give the crawler more paths and more reason to fetch soon.

There used to be a third route: an address you could request to tell Google a sitemap had changed. Google retired that sitemap ping endpoint in 2023, saying such unauthenticated submissions were not useful, and pointed to the lastmod value in sitemaps instead. Any plugin or tutorial that still talks about pinging Google on publish is describing something that no longer works.

Ways to speed up discovery that do work

• Submit the sitemap once. After that, do not resubmit for each post; Google rereads it. Steps are in submit a sitemap to Google.
• Keep lastmod honest. Google says it uses the value when it is consistently accurate. WordPress fills it from the post's modified time.
• Link to the new post from an existing, crawled page on the day you publish: a related article, a hub page, the homepage.
• Use URL Inspection → Request indexing for the few posts where hours matter. It is a manual, rate-limited tool, not a workflow for every post. See request indexing in Google.

How long it takes varies with how often Google visits your site. Busy, established sites see posts picked up within hours; new sites with few links can wait days or longer. Being crawled is also not the same as being indexed, which depends on what Google makes of the page.

Bing and other engines accept a push

Other search engines do offer a notification. IndexNow is a protocol used by Bing, Yandex and several others: your site sends the URL that changed, and participating engines share it. Google does not take part.

WordPress core does not send IndexNow notifications, so this is plugin territory. Hydrogen SEO's instant indexing is off until you switch it on; after that it submits a URL when a post is published, updated or removed, and serves the key file the protocol requires. It costs nothing and removes the wait on the Bing side, which also feeds some AI assistants that rely on Bing's index.

As for the Update Services box, leaving the default line there is harmless. Adding long lists of ping addresses copied from old blog posts achieves nothing for Google and slows the background task.