IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website tell participating search engines straight away when a page is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for their crawlers to notice. It was launched in October 2021 by Microsoft Bing and Yandex, and other search engines have joined since.
How IndexNow works
The site creates a key, a long string of letters and numbers, and hosts it in a text file on its own domain so search engines can confirm the site owns it. Whenever a URL changes, the site sends a simple request containing that URL and the key to an IndexNow endpoint. One request can carry a single URL or a list of up to 10,000.
Participating engines share submissions with each other, so notifying one passes the URL to all of them. At the time of writing (October 2026) participants include Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep. Google is not among them. It said in 2021 that it would test the protocol, but it continues to rely on its own crawling, XML sitemaps and Search Console.
Most site owners never send these requests by hand. Several WordPress SEO plugins support IndexNow, Microsoft publishes a plugin of its own, Cloudflare can send notifications for sites on its network, and some hosted website builders do it automatically. A submission is a notification, not an instruction: the search engine still decides whether to crawl the URL and whether the page deserves a place in its index.
Why it matters
Google handles most searches in the UK, so IndexNow will not change much on its own for most businesses. Its value lies beyond Google. Bing’s index serves Bing itself and Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft has pointed site owners to IndexNow as the quickest way to get fresh content into it. As more people use AI assistants that draw on search indexes, being current in more than one index has some value.
It matters most for content that changes often or goes stale quickly: stock levels and prices on an online shop, job vacancies, property listings, events and news. A Manchester letting agent who marks a flat as let wants that change reflected quickly, not whenever the crawler next calls.
There is also an efficiency gain. If search engines are told what changed, Bingbot and the others need fewer blind recrawls of pages that have not changed, which means less load on your server.
Common mistakes
- Expecting IndexNow to speed up indexing in Google. It does not.
- Running two plugins that both submit, so every change is sent twice.
- Submitting URLs that redirect, are noindexed or return errors.
- Moving or regenerating the key file so it no longer matches the key being submitted, and submissions are rejected.
- Submitting every URL on the site every day whether or not it changed, which wastes the signal.
How to act on it
Check whether your platform or CDN already sends IndexNow notifications; plenty of sites have it running without the owner knowing. If not, switch it on through your SEO plugin or Cloudflare rather than building an integration. Then verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools, where you can see submitted URLs and any errors.
Keep your XML sitemap accurate as well, since Google still depends on it; the two work side by side. Setting this up and checking it works is part of my technical SEO work.