What Is IndexNow? How It Works, Who Supports It and How to Set It Up

IndexNow is a free, open protocol that lets a website tell search engines the moment a URL is added, updated, or deleted. Instead of waiting for a crawler to come back and notice the change, your site sends a short ping, and every participating search engine hears about it at once. Microsoft Bing and Yandex launched IndexNow in October 2021. Today Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz and Yep support it. Google still does not.

That last point is where many IndexNow guides overpromise. IndexNow will not get a page into Google faster, and it does not boost rankings anywhere. What it does well is narrower and still valuable: it removes the wait between publishing and discovery on Bing, whose index also feeds Microsoft Copilot, and on the other engines that share its submissions. Think of it as instant indexing requests, not instant rankings.

This guide explains how the IndexNow protocol works, which search engines use it, where it fits next to XML sitemaps, the WordPress plugins that add it in a few clicks, and how to confirm your pings are actually landing.

IndexNow at a glance

• What it does: notifies participating search engines when a URL is added, updated, redirected or deleted.
• Created by: Microsoft Bing and Yandex, launched in October 2021.
• Supported by: Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz and Yep, plus an Amazon endpoint listed in the protocol’s FAQ.
• Google: not supported.
• Cost: free and open.
• Batch limit: up to 10,000 URLs per POST request.
• Ownership check: a key of 8 to 128 characters, hosted as a text file on your domain.
• Effect on rankings: none. It speeds up discovery, not ranking.

Why Indexing Speed Matters

A page can’t rank, earn a click, or be quoted in an AI answer until a search engine has crawled and indexed it. If you want the full picture of that pipeline, our guide to how search engine indexing works walks through crawling, indexing and serving step by step.

The slow part is usually discovery. Traditional crawlers work on a pull model: they revisit URLs on a schedule, follow links, read sitemaps, and only then find out whether anything changed. A large site with lots of fresh links gets recrawled often. A small site, a deep product page, or an old post you just rewrote can wait days or weeks before a crawler notices. In the meantime, searchers see the old title, the old price, or nothing at all.

Picture an online clothing store that publishes its new season collection on Monday morning. If search engines don’t recrawl those product pages until the following week, the store spends its launch window invisible while competitors whose pages were already indexed pick up the traffic.

What Is IndexNow?

IndexNow is an open protocol, created by Microsoft Bing and Yandex, that lets a website push a notification to participating search engines whenever a URL is added, updated, redirected or deleted. The engines share each notification with one another, so a single ping reaches all of them.

It is often described as push indexing because it flips discovery from pull to push. Your website (or your CMS, SEO plugin, or CDN) sends an HTTP request listing the URLs that changed. The receiving search engine checks that the request really came from the site owner, then it can prioritize crawling those URLs. The protocol itself is published under a Creative Commons license.

Two design choices make it more useful than older submission methods:

• One ping reaches every participant. Search engines that adopt IndexNow agree to share submitted URLs with all other participating engines, so you don’t need separate submissions for Bing, Yandex and the rest.
• It covers deletions and redirects, not only new pages. Telling engines that a URL now returns a 404, a 410 or a redirect helps them drop or update stale results faster.

It is not a ranking factor, a paid service, or a guarantee. The protocol’s own FAQ states that submitting a URL does not guarantee immediate indexing. Each engine still decides whether the page is worth crawling and keeping.

How the IndexNow Protocol Works

Under the hood, the IndexNow API is deliberately simple. There are three moving parts.

1. An IndexNow key that proves you own the site

You generate a key between 8 and 128 characters long, using only letters, numbers and dashes. Then you host a UTF-8 text file named after the key (for example, 3f2b9c7e41d84a6b.txt) at the root of your domain, containing nothing but the key itself. When a search engine receives a submission, it fetches that file to confirm the request came from the site owner.

The quickest way to get a valid key is a UUID. Run uuidgen in a Mac or Linux terminal, or New-Guid in Windows PowerShell, and use the result as both the key and the file name.

If you can’t write to the root folder, you can host the file elsewhere on the same host and point to it with the keyLocation parameter. The catch is that the file’s folder then limits which URLs that key can submit. Each subdomain also counts as a separate host, so blog.example.com and shop.example.com each need their own IndexNow key file.

2. A ping when content changes

To submit a single URL, you send a GET request:

https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://www.example.com/new-page/&key=YOUR_KEY

To submit many URLs at once, you send a JSON POST request. One request can carry up to 10,000 URLs:

POST /indexnow HTTP/1.1
Host: api.indexnow.org
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{
  "host": "www.example.com",
  "key": "YOUR_KEY",
  "keyLocation": "https://www.example.com/YOUR_KEY.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://www.example.com/new-page/",
    "https://www.example.com/updated-product/",
    "https://www.example.com/deleted-page/"
  ]
}

You can send requests to the shared endpoint at api.indexnow.org or directly to a participating engine such as bing.com/indexnow. Either way, the submission is shared with the others. The full parameter reference lives in the official IndexNow documentation.

3. A response code that tells you what happened

Response code	What it means	What to do
200 OK	The URL was received	Nothing. It confirms receipt, not indexing.
202 Accepted	Received, key validation still pending	Normal on the first request after you set up a new key.
400 Bad Request	Invalid format	Check URL encoding and the structure of the request.
403 Forbidden	The key is not valid	Make sure the key file exists, is public, and contains the exact key.
422 Unprocessable Entity	URLs don’t belong to the host, or the key doesn’t match the protocol’s format	Submit only URLs on the host the key verifies.
429 Too Many Requests	Rate limited as potential spam	Slow down, honor the Retry-After header, and stop resubmitting unchanged URLs.

Which Search Engines Support IndexNow?

IndexNow’s official site lists Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep as supporting search engines. Its FAQ also lists an endpoint for Amazon, which Microsoft announced in 2025 would adopt the protocol. Because participants share submissions, a ping sent to any one of them reaches the whole group.

• Microsoft Bing: co-creator and the largest participant. Bing’s index also grounds Microsoft Copilot’s web answers.
• Yandex: co-creator and the leading search engine in Russia.
• Naver: South Korea’s largest search engine.
• Seznam.cz: the Czech search engine, which joined in 2022.
• Yep: the search engine built by Ahrefs.
• Amazon: listed with its own endpoint in the IndexNow FAQ.

Adoption on the publishing side is broad too. The IndexNow FAQ lists native or plugin support in WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Duda, Drupal, Joomla and about ten other platforms, and Cloudflare supports it at the CDN level. Microsoft said in 2024 that roughly 17% of the URLs clicked in Bing’s web results were discovered through IndexNow.

Does Google Support IndexNow?

No. Google said in late 2021 that it would test IndexNow, but it never joined, and it is not on the list of participants. An IndexNow ping sends nothing to Google.

Google has also closed the old shortcut many plugins relied on. In June 2023 it deprecated its sitemap ping endpoint, which stopped working six months later. For Google, faster discovery now comes from:

• An accurate XML sitemap submitted in Search Console, with lastmod dates that change only when the content meaningfully changes.
• Internal links from pages Google already crawls often, such as your homepage and category pages.
• The URL Inspection tool in Search Console for a handful of high-priority pages.

Google Indexing API and Bing URL Submission vs IndexNow

Two other tools often get mixed up with IndexNow:

• Google Indexing API: Google’s own push channel, but only for pages with job posting or livestream structured data. It is not a general-purpose way to submit blog posts or product pages.
• Bing URL Submission: a tool inside Bing Webmaster Tools, also available as an API, that sends URLs to Bing only. IndexNow covers Bing too and reaches every other participating engine with the same request.

The practical model is two pipelines: sitemaps and Search Console for Google, IndexNow for everyone else.

IndexNow vs XML Sitemaps: Do You Need Both?

Yes. They solve different problems, and the IndexNow FAQ itself recommends using both together.

	IndexNow	XML sitemap
Job	Announces what just changed	Lists every URL you want indexed
Timing	Sent the moment content changes	Read whenever the crawler decides to fetch it
Covers	New, updated, redirected and deleted URLs	Current indexable URLs with lastmod dates
Google	Not supported	Supported
Best for	Fresh, time-sensitive changes	Complete coverage, including old and deep pages

If your sitemap is missing, bloated with noindexed URLs, or reporting fake lastmod dates, fix that first. Our explainer on what an XML sitemap is and why you need one covers what belongs in it. IndexNow then handles the fast lane for the pages that just changed.

One rule from the protocol is easy to miss: don’t use IndexNow to resubmit pages that changed before you set it up. Let accurate sitemap dates surface those, and use IndexNow only for changes going forward.

Benefits and Limits of IndexNow for SEO

What IndexNow does well

• Faster discovery on Bing and partner engines, because they no longer have to stumble on your change during a routine recrawl.
• Less wasted crawling. Engines can focus on the URLs you flagged instead of re-fetching unchanged pages. Cloudflare has estimated that more than half of the crawler traffic it sees is wasted effort.
• Cleaner results after deletions, redirects and migrations.
• One free integration for several search engines.

What IndexNow will not do

• It won’t improve rankings. A faster crawl of a weak page is still a weak page.
• It doesn’t guarantee indexing. Thin, duplicate, blocked or noindexed pages can still be skipped.
• It doesn’t reach Google.
• It isn’t extra crawl budget. The IndexNow FAQ notes that submitted URLs count toward your site’s crawl quota, so pinging every tiny edit works against you.
• Over-pinging backfires. Resubmitting unchanged URLs can trigger 429 errors. For pages that change constantly, wait at least five minutes between submissions of the same URL.

Why IndexNow Matters More for AI Search

When IndexNow launched, the pitch was faster Bing results. The stronger reason to set it up today is AI answers. Microsoft Copilot grounds its web answers in Bing’s index, so a page Bing hasn’t recrawled is a page Copilot can only quote in its old form, or not at all. The IndexNow FAQ now frames the protocol the same way, saying it helps keep your content current in AI-powered search results.

Microsoft has also started showing publishers the payoff. In February 2026, Bing Webmaster Tools introduced an AI Performance report, as a public preview, that shows how often your pages are cited in Copilot, in AI-generated summaries in Bing and in select partner experiences. When you correct a statistic, a price or a recommendation, IndexNow is the quickest way to get the corrected version in front of those systems.

IndexNow is one item on a longer list, though. Crawler access, server-rendered HTML, schema and answer-first formatting matter just as much, and our guide to optimizing WordPress for AI search covers the rest of the checklist.

When IndexNow Helps Most

• Ecommerce: new products, price changes, stock status and expired offers.
• News and time-sensitive pages: events, launches and announcements people search for in the first hours.
• Content refreshes: rewritten articles where the old version is now inaccurate.
• Migrations and URL changes: once redirects are live, submitting the old and new URLs helps participating engines update faster. Pair it with a careful site migration plan so the redirects you ping actually work.
• Deleted pages: removed products or expired listings that should drop out of results.
• Large sites: where crawlers rarely reach deep pages on their own.

Where it matters less: a small brochure site that changes twice a year will notice little difference. It costs nothing to switch on, though.

How to Add IndexNow to WordPress

You don’t need to touch code to use IndexNow on WordPress. Most SEO plugins can generate the key, serve the key file and ping on publish. Pick one method and use only that one, because running two or three IndexNow integrations at the same time just sends duplicate pings.

Method	Cost	Best for	Notes
Rank Math SEO	Free	Sites already on Rank Math	Instant Indexing module with manual, bulk and history views
Yoast SEO Premium	Paid	Sites on Yoast Premium	On by default with a single on/off switch
All in One SEO	Paid (Basic plan and up)	Sites on AIOSEO	IndexNow addon in the Feature Manager
IndexNow Plugin by Microsoft Bing	Free	A standalone tool	Respects noindex, excludes paths, retries failed URLs
Cloudflare Crawler Hints	Free	Sites behind Cloudflare	Works at the CDN level with no plugin

Option 1: Rank Math (free)

IndexNow comes with the free version of Rank Math through its Instant Indexing module.

1. In your WordPress dashboard, open Rank Math SEO and enable the Instant Indexing module.
2. Go to Rank Math SEO » Instant Indexing » Settings and choose which post types should be submitted automatically.
3. Confirm that Rank Math has generated an API key. It hosts the key file for you.
4. Use the Submit URLs tab for manual or batch submissions and the History tab to check response codes.

Rank Math skips URLs set to noindex, which keeps thin archives and test pages out of your pings.

Option 2: Yoast SEO Premium

Yoast added IndexNow to Yoast SEO Premium in 2022, and it is switched on by default. Every time you publish or update content, Premium pings IndexNow in the background, with no key or settings to manage beyond a single on/off switch. The free version of Yoast SEO does not include it, so free users need one of the other options in this guide.

Option 3: All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

In AIOSEO, IndexNow is an addon available on the Basic plan and higher. It is not part of the free Lite version.

1. Update AIOSEO to its latest version.
2. Go to All in One SEO » Feature Manager and activate the IndexNow addon.

3. AIOSEO creates and hosts the key automatically. To view or change it, open All in One SEO » General Settings » Webmaster Tools and select IndexNow.
4. If you edit the key, click Save Changes.

Option 4: IndexNow Plugin by Microsoft Bing

Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster team maintains a free standalone plugin, listed as IndexNow Plugin in the WordPress directory and often called the Bing IndexNow plugin. It is the lightest choice if your SEO plugin has no IndexNow support or you prefer to keep indexing separate.

1. Go to Plugins » Add New, search for IndexNow Plugin, then install and activate it.
2. Open Settings » IndexNow and click Let’s Get Started.
3. The plugin generates and hosts your key, then submits new, updated and deleted URLs automatically.

Before submitting, the plugin checks for noindex tags, X-Robots-Tag headers and the WordPress search engine visibility setting. It also lets you exclude URL paths with wildcard patterns, retry failed submissions, and view IndexNow insights in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Option 5: Cloudflare Crawler Hints

If your site runs behind Cloudflare, Crawler Hints can send IndexNow signals from Cloudflare’s network when your content changes. It is free for all Cloudflare customers and needs no plugin. Check that it is enabled in your dashboard’s caching settings, and if you use it, switch off plugin-based IndexNow so you don’t send duplicate signals.

IndexNow on Shopify, Wix and Other Platforms

Outside WordPress, you often don’t need to set anything up. Shopify supports IndexNow natively for its stores, and the IndexNow FAQ lists Wix, GoDaddy, Duda, Drupal, Joomla, PrestaShop, Shopware, OpenCart, Typo3, Umbraco and others as supporting it either natively or through extensions. Check your platform’s SEO settings or app store before building anything yourself.

If your platform has no option, Cloudflare Crawler Hints covers any site that runs behind Cloudflare, and the manual setup below works for custom and headless builds.

Manual IndexNow Setup for Custom and Headless Sites

1. Generate a key with a UUID generator: 8 to 128 characters, using letters, numbers and dashes only.
2. Save it as {your-key}.txt in UTF-8, with the key as the only content, and upload it to your site root.
3. Open https://yourdomain.com/{your-key}.txt in a browser and confirm it loads publicly, with no login, redirect or firewall challenge.
4. Trigger submissions from your publish, update, unpublish and delete events, or from your deploy pipeline on static sites.
5. Submit only meaningful changes, wait at least five minutes before resubmitting the same URL, and log every response code.

How to Check That IndexNow Is Working

• Open your key file URL. If you see only the key as plain text, verification will work. If you get a 404, a login screen or a security challenge, engines will answer your pings with a 403.
• Read your plugin’s log. Rank Math, AIOSEO and the Bing plugin all show recent submissions. You want 200, or 202 on the very first ping.
• Check Bing Webmaster Tools. Verify your site there and use its IndexNow report to see which URLs Bing received from your pings.
• Inspect the URL in Bing Webmaster Tools. The URL Inspection tool shows whether Bing has indexed the page and when it last crawled it.

Common IndexNow errors and fixes

• 403 Forbidden: the key file is missing, blocked by a security plugin or firewall, or the key inside it doesn’t match.
• 422 Unprocessable Entity: you submitted URLs from a different host than the key covers. The usual culprit is www vs non-www.
• 429 Too Many Requests: you are pinging too often. Check whether two integrations are firing at once.
• Staging URLs getting pinged: set your staging site to discourage search engines or to noindex so test URLs never get submitted.

Should You Turn On IndexNow?

For almost every site, yes. It takes minutes, costs nothing on most setups, and removes days of waiting on Bing, Copilot and the other participating engines. Keep the expectations realistic, though: IndexNow decides how fast a search engine hears about your page, not whether the page deserves to rank. That part still comes down to content that earns its ranking.

How we checked this guide: protocol details come from the official IndexNow documentation and FAQ, and plugin steps come from each vendor’s own documentation and WordPress.org listings. Visualmodo has no commercial relationship with any plugin or service mentioned here. You can read more about our editorial process.

IndexNow Questions: Google, Rankings, Keys and Plugins