IndexNow

How it works

You host a key file on your site to prove ownership, then send a request listing the changed URLs to an IndexNow endpoint. Engines that take part, including Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver, share submissions with each other, so one ping reaches all of them.

Google does not take part in IndexNow. For Google, keep a truthful sitemap with accurate lastmod dates and use Search Console.

Why it matters for AI search

Several AI assistants draw on Bing's index for live web results. Getting a new page into Bing quickly can mean it becomes citable in AI answers sooner. For a launch, where the first days matter most, that speed is worth the small setup.

Good practice

Submit only URLs that really changed, and only canonical, indexable ones. Submitting every URL on every deploy looks like spam and may get your key ignored. Batch submissions of up to 10,000 URLs are allowed in one request.

Setting it up

Generate a key of 8 to 128 hexadecimal characters, save it as a text file named after the key at your site's root, and keep that file live. Then send a POST request with your host, the key and a list of URLs to api.indexnow.org/indexnow. A 200 or 202 response means the submission was accepted.

Most content systems and hosting platforms have IndexNow plugins or built in support, which ping automatically when you publish or update a page. If yours does not, a small script after each deploy that submits only the changed URLs is enough.

Example

When a launch goes live on Aback Launch, its page URL is sent to IndexNow, and Bing can crawl it within minutes.

Questions people ask

Does IndexNow guarantee indexing?

No. It tells engines a URL changed. They still decide whether and when to crawl and index it.