IndexNow

What it is for

Without a push mechanism, a search engine only learns a page changed the next time it happens to crawl it, which the protocol's own site describes as a process that can otherwise take days to weeks, since engines do not recrawl every URL often. IndexNow turns that around: the site owner sends a single ping naming the changed URL, and participating engines can prioritize crawling it instead of discovering the change on their normal schedule.

The protocol is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and currently lists Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep as supporting search engines, according to IndexNow.org's own documentation.

How it works

A site sends an HTTP request naming the changed URL to any one participating engine's IndexNow endpoint, authenticated with a key the site owner generates and hosts on their own domain. Because the participating engines share submissions with each other under the protocol, pinging one is enough to reach all of them, rather than requiring a separate submission per engine.

Google is not among the engines IndexNow.org lists as participating, and runs its own separate mechanism instead, the Indexing API, which Google's own documentation scopes to a narrow set of page types: job posting pages and livestream pages. A general content update on a typical page has no equivalent push option into Google through either protocol; Google's main path for fast discovery of ordinary pages remains a correctly structured, frequently refreshed XML sitemap.

Why it matters for AI visibility

Several AI assistants build features on top of search infrastructure that IndexNow's participants operate: Bing powers Copilot's web results, for instance. A faster ping-to-crawl cycle on an IndexNow-participating engine can mean a time-sensitive update, a price change, a correction, a new product reaches that engine's index sooner, and by extension reaches anything built on top of it sooner. The effect does not extend to Google-powered surfaces such as AI Overviews or AI Mode, since Google does not participate in the protocol.

Good practices

• Submit a ping immediately after a meaningful content change, not as a scheduled batch job disconnected from when edits actually happen.
• Generate and host the required key exactly as IndexNow's documentation specifies, since a misconfigured key causes the submission to fail silently from the publisher's side.
• Treat IndexNow as a complement to a sitemap, not a replacement, since it covers only the engines that participate in the protocol.
• Check server logs or the hosting platform's IndexNow integration to confirm pings are actually being accepted, rather than assuming a plugin is working.

Common mistakes

• Assuming a successful IndexNow ping also notifies Google, when Google does not participate in the protocol at all.
• Pinging every page on a large site at once during a migration instead of the pages that actually changed, which the protocol is not designed for.
• Treating IndexNow submission as equivalent to ranking or indexing confirmation; it only signals that a crawl should be prioritized, not that the content was accepted into the index.
• Forgetting to keep the authentication key file live on the domain, which causes every future submission to be rejected.