What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an open protocol created by Microsoft Bing and Yandex that lets website owners instantly notify search engines when a page is added, updated or deleted. Instead of waiting for a crawler to find the change on its own, your site sends a short request with the list of changed URLs.
Participating search engines share submitted URLs with each other. Submitting a page once is enough for all of them to learn about it, which saves crawl budget for you and for the search engines.
Which search engines support IndexNow?
| Search engine | Main audience |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Bing | Worldwide; its index also feeds Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia |
| Yandex | Russian-speaking countries, Turkey |
| Naver | South Korea |
| Seznam.cz | Czech Republic |
| Yep | Privacy-focused search by Ahrefs |
Google does not support IndexNow. For Google, rely on your XML sitemap and Google Search Console.
Why submit URLs with IndexNow
- Faster discovery. New articles, product pages and landing pages are crawled sooner instead of waiting days for a scheduled visit.
- Fresh search results. Updated prices, stock status or corrected content show up in search faster, and deleted pages drop out sooner.
- Less crawler load. Search engines visit the pages that actually changed instead of re-crawling the whole site.
- One request, many engines. No need to verify your site and submit URLs separately in every webmaster console.
How to submit URLs to Bing and Yandex with IndexNow
- Create a key. The key is a string of 8 to 128 characters: letters a–z and A–Z, digits and dashes. After registration we generate one for you.
-
Publish the key file.
Upload a UTF-8 text file named after the key, for example
https://example.com/{key}.txt, to the root of your site. The file must contain only the key and be available over HTTPS without redirects. - Submit your URLs. Enter the host, the key and the list of changed URLs in the form above. We check the key file, save the site and send the URLs to IndexNow within a minute.
- Check the result. The “My sites” page shows the status of every URL. If a search engine is temporarily unavailable, we retry automatically.
IndexNow vs XML sitemap
IndexNow does not replace a sitemap: the two work best together.
| IndexNow | XML sitemap | |
|---|---|---|
| How it works | You push changed URLs | Crawler pulls the full list |
| Speed | Minutes after the change | On the next sitemap visit |
| Content | Only changed pages | All indexable pages |
| Not supported | Supported |
Automate URL submission with the API
Call the REST API from your CMS, e-commerce platform or deploy script to submit pages as soon as they are published. Get a token, then send up to 100 URLs per request:
curl -X POST https://4in.top/api/v1/account/login \
-H "Accept: application/json" \
-d [email protected] -d password=secret
curl -X POST https://4in.top/api/v1/link/add \
-H "Accept: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
-d host=example.com \
-d "links[]=https://example.com/new-page.html"