IndexNow: Ping Search Engines the Moment Your Content Changes

IndexNow is a simple protocol that lets you instantly notify search engines when your URLs are added, updated, or deleted — instead of waiting days for the next crawl.

Which search engines support IndexNow?

Bing, Yandex, Seznam, and Naver. One submission to api.indexnow.org notifies all of them. Google does not participate — for Google, submit your sitemap in Search Console.

How it works in 3 steps

1. Generate a key — a random string, e.g. 32 hex characters.
2. Prove ownership — upload a text file named <key>.txt containing the key to your domain root, so https://example.com/<key>.txt serves it.
3. Submit URLs — POST JSON to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow with your host, key, key location, and up to 10,000 URLs.

What the responses mean

• 200/202 — accepted, engines notified.
• 403 — key file missing or wrong content. Double-check the URL.
• 422 — submitted URLs don't belong to the host.
• 429 — slow down, you're over the rate limit.

Best practices

• Ping only URLs that actually changed — don't resubmit your whole sitemap hourly.
• Submit within minutes of publishing for the fastest effect.
• Keep your sitemap under 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed, per the sitemap spec.

SitemapPing automates all of this: paste your sitemap URL, generate a key, and ping — no code required.