Technical SEO
IndexNow
What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website notify participating search engines immediately when a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for crawlers to rediscover it. It was launched in October 2021 by Microsoft Bing and Yandex, and is also supported by engines such as Naver, Seznam and Yep. A notification sent to one participating engine is shared with the others.
To use it, a site hosts a key file at its root to prove ownership and then sends the changed URLs, singly or in batches, to an IndexNow endpoint. Many CMS plugins and CDNs can do this automatically. Google does not currently use IndexNow; it relies on its own crawling and sitemaps.
Why it matters for SEO
Faster discovery means new pages and updates appear sooner in Bing and other participating engines. Bing's index also feeds a number of AI assistants, so quick indexing there can matter for AI search visibility too. It also saves crawl resources on both sides.
Example
A news site publishes an article at 09:00 and its CMS immediately sends a request to api.indexnow.org with the article URL, the site's host and its key. The key file at example.com/<key>.txt confirms ownership. Bing can fetch the page within minutes instead of waiting for its next scheduled crawl.
Free tools for IndexNow
Put the theory to work
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