IndexNow

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website notify participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for a crawler to notice. One submission to any participating endpoint is shared with all the others.

Microsoft Bing and Yandex launched the protocol in October 2021. As of October 2026, the participant list published at indexnow.org names seven: Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver, Yep, the Internet Archive and Amazonbot. Google is not a participant. It said in 2021 that it would test the protocol, but it has never joined, so IndexNow pings do nothing for Google Search, AI Overviews or AI Mode. For Google, sitemaps and the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console remain the ways to request a recrawl.

Setup takes two parts. The site hosts a key file (a text file named after a generated key) at its root or another public location, which proves ownership. Then, whenever content changes, the site sends the changed URLs to an endpoint, either one at a time with a GET request or in a JSON POST of up to 10,000 URLs. The shared endpoint api.indexnow.org is the simplest choice. Many CMS platforms, SEO plugins and CDNs, including Bing's own WordPress plugin, handle this automatically. The protocol is meant for recent changes, including redirects and pages that now return 404 or 410, not for resubmitting a whole site.

IndexNow is a discovery signal, not a ranking or indexing guarantee. A participating engine still decides whether to crawl the URL and whether to index it. The page must be crawlable, canonical and consistent with your XML sitemap, internal links and structured data.

Its value for AI search comes from who uses the participating indexes. Microsoft Copilot answers are grounded in Bing's index, so faster Bing recrawls mean Copilot is less likely to quote a stale price or a retired policy. Amazon's participation matters for Amazon's own search and assistant products, though Amazon has not described what it does with submitted URLs. Assistants with their own crawlers, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, do not accept IndexNow submissions; for them, freshness depends on their crawlers reaching your pages, which you can check in server logs.

The practical approach is to wire IndexNow into your publishing workflow for pages where freshness has a cost when it lags: prices, stock, promotions, documentation, policies, job listings and events. Then verify the effect, not the ping: after a submission, look for a verified Bingbot request to that URL in your logs, and check that Copilot answers reflect the change. Keep content freshness signals honest too, since resubmitting unchanged pages wastes the signal.