KhaqanWhat is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an open protocol, launched by Microsoft Bing and Yandex in 2021, that lets a website notify participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted, by sending the URL and a site-owned key to a single API endpoint.
The mechanism is simple. You generate a key (a string of letters and digits), host it as a text file at the site root so the engines can confirm you control the domain, and then send changed URLs to api.indexnow.org, either one at a time as a GET request or in a batch as a JSON POST. A submission to any participating engine is shared with all of them. The engines that participate include Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam, which means Microsoft Copilot and the Bing-backed part of ChatGPT search see your changes quickly. Google does not participate; it announced a test of the protocol in 2021 and has stayed with its own crawl scheduling.
It matters to a business because crawl delay is invisible and costly. A price change, a new service page or a corrected address can sit unnoticed for days or weeks while the old version keeps being served in answers. Pinging on publish closes that gap for the engines that listen, at no cost.
An example is a job board that publishes new listings daily; each new or expired listing URL is submitted at the moment the page is generated, so Bing's index tracks the site's state instead of lagging behind it. Most content platforms have a plugin or a setting for this, and a site with its own build script needs only a few lines of code.
The common mistake is expecting IndexNow to affect Google, and the second is submitting the whole sitemap on every build, which the engines treat as noise. Submit only what changed, keep the key file in place, and remember that it complements a sitemap rather than replacing it.
Related terms
- AI search visibility: AI search visibility is how often, and how accurately, a website is used and cited by AI-driven search products such as ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot and Claude when people ask questions the site could answer.
- AI Overviews (Google): AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows at the top of some search results, built by its Gemini models from pages in Google's index, with links to the sources it used; they launched in 2024 and now appear for many queries.
- GEO (generative engine optimisation): Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of making a website easy for generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini to crawl, understand and cite, so that the site appears as a source in AI-generated answers.