IndexNow: Tell Search Engines About New Content in Minutes, Not Weeks

The open protocol used by Bing and Yandex that turns crawling from waiting into notifying.

Fun fact

Before IndexNow, a new page played a lottery: search engine crawlers revisit a site every few days to weeks, so a fresh article could sit invisible for half a month. IndexNow — launched jointly by Microsoft Bing and Yandex in 2020 — inverts the model: the site calls the search engine. One HTTP POST with a JSON list of changed URLs and a key file is enough; the protocol then propagates your submission to every participating engine instantly. Waste is gone too: engines skip re-crawling unchanged pages, saving crawl budget on both sides.

Tool usage guide

  1. Generate a key (any hex string), place it at https://yoursite.com/<key>.txt.
  2. When a page changes, POST a JSON body {"host":"yoursite.com","key":"...","urlList":["https://yoursite.com/page.html"]} to https://api.indexnow.org/IndexNow.
  3. Want to test the API call without writing code? Build and send the exact POST with the HTTP Request Builder and inspect the response status.

Try the tool

HTTP Request Builder →

Further reading

IndexNow — Wikipedia article