IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website tell participating search engines which URLs were added, updated or deleted, so crawlers do not have to discover the change on their own. According to reports, Microsoft Bing announced it in October 2021. A site sends the notification, and the participating engines share submitted URLs with each other.
At a glance
- Connects
- Websites and participating search engines (notifying new, changed and deleted URLs)
- Transport
- HTTP GET (one URL) or POST with JSON (up to 10,000 URLs)
- Specification
- IndexNow Documentation
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How does IndexNow work?
- Create a key. The key is 8 to 128 characters long and may contain letters, digits and dashes.
- Host the key file. A text file with the key as its content is placed at the root of the site, for example
https://example.com/<key>.txt. This proves ownership. A different location can be declared with thekeyLocationparameter. - Send URLs. One URL goes in a GET request, up to 10,000 URLs in a JSON POST request.
A successful request returns HTTP 200 or 202. Typical errors are 400 (bad request), 403 (key problem), 422 (URLs do not match the host) and 429 (too many requests).
Example
GET https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://example.com/new-page&key=0123456789abcdef
POST https://api.indexnow.org/IndexNow
{
"host": "example.com",
"key": "0123456789abcdef",
"urlList": [
"https://example.com/new-page",
"https://example.com/changed-page"
]
}
Does Google support IndexNow?
In the sources checked, Google is not named as a participant. According to reports, Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and Yep take part. For Google, XML sitemaps remain the documented way to signal changes in bulk. Check the current status before relying on IndexNow for Google.
Does a notification guarantee indexing?
A notification asks engines to look at a URL. Neither indexing nor ranking is promised.
Common mistakes
- Key file missing or in the wrong place. The request is rejected with a 403.
- URLs from another host. A request for
example.commay only list URLs of that host. - Key file in a narrow location. A key file in a subdirectory covers only URLs below that path.
- Pinging unchanged URLs. The documentation says to submit changed URLs only, not the same ones repeatedly. Too many requests return 429, which signals possible spam.
- Treating receipt as indexing. HTTP 200 only confirms that the notification arrived.
Sources
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