IndexNow (instant URL submission protocol)

How it looks

A single URL is submitted with a GET request to any participating endpoint, as described in the IndexNow documentation:

https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://www.example.com/product.html&key=your-key

https://www.bing.com/indexnow?url=https://www.example.com/product.html&key=your-key

A batch goes as a POST with a JSON body to /indexnow on the chosen host:

POST /indexnow HTTP/1.1

Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{"host": "www.example.com", "key": "your-key", "urlList": ["https://www.example.com/url1", "https://www.example.com/url2"]}

With curl:

curl -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"host":"www.example.com","key":"your-key","urlList":["https://www.example.com/url1"]}'

The key file

Ownership is proven with a text file on your own host. Per the documentation, the key must be 8 to 128 hexadecimal characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and dashes), and you host a UTF-8 text file named {your-key}.txt containing the key at the root of the site, for example https://www.example.com/your-key.txt. The engine fetches that file once to verify the host and reuses the key until you change it. A key file can also live elsewhere on the host, passed as keyLocation, but then it only covers URLs under that path.

The response codes, from the same documentation:

A 200 or 202 only means the engine received the URL. It is not a promise of crawling or indexing.

Which engines participate

The IndexNow FAQ lists the participating endpoints: a global endpoint at api.indexnow.org, Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex, Yep and an Amazon endpoint, and notes that a submission to any one of them is shared across all IndexNow-enabled engines; the documentation makes that sharing a requirement for joining. Bing's own IndexNow page describes it as a free, open protocol with built-in support in many CMSs and CDNs.

Google is not on that list. Google's page on asking Google to recrawl does not mention IndexNow; the documented routes are the URL Inspection tool for a few URLs and sitemaps for many. A claim that IndexNow speeds up Google indexing has no basis in Google's documentation.

How it differs from sitemaps and the Indexing API

The IndexNow FAQ says the protocol is for recent additions, updates and deletions, not for submitting every URL at once (a full-site submission is acceptable after a migration), and recommends using sitemaps alongside it for complete, long-term discovery. How sitemaps work is in the entry on the XML sitemap.

Google's Indexing API quickstart states that the API can only be used to crawl pages with either JobPosting or BroadcastEvent embedded in a VideoObject. It is not a general-purpose submission channel.

When it helps

• Shops and classifieds where prices, stock and listings change daily and Bing traffic matters.
• News and publishing sites that need a story in Bing or Yandex within minutes.
• Markets where Yandex, Naver or Seznam.cz have a meaningful share.
• Deletions and redirects: the FAQ says submitting removed or redirected URLs helps engines reflect the new structure faster.

It does not help with Google. If your problem is pages waiting in Discovered - currently not indexed, IndexNow changes nothing; that is a sitemap, internal linking, server response and content quality question.

Common mistakes

How to check it

Confirm the key file first:

curl -s https://www.example.com/your-key.txt

It must return 200 and print only the key. Then submit a URL and read the status code:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://www.example.com/page/&key=your-key"

Expect 200 or 202. There is nothing to check in Google Search Console, because Google does not receive the submissions. Before submitting, make sure the URL is indexable at all, meaning it returns 200 and carries no blocking directive from the meta robots tag: the indexability checker reports status code, noindex, canonical and robots.txt for up to 10 URLs.

Why monitor it

IndexRise does not send or monitor IndexNow submissions yet. The nearest checks are the ones that make a submission worth sending: the nightly status code of each monitored URL, noindex and canonical changes, and sitemap health. If your IndexNow integration fires on content changes, the events in IndexRise show what those changes did to indexability the next morning.