Adopt IndexNow for Real-Time Indexing

Also known as: Instant Index Notification, Push Indexing Protocol, Bing IndexNow

Implement the IndexNow protocol to notify Bing and other participating engines immediately when content is published or updated, so they can discover changes faster.

What is Adopt IndexNow for Real-Time Indexing?

Impact Mechanism:
RAG & Retrieval
Category:
Technical & Schema
Effort:
Low
Skill needed:
Technical & Dev
Evidence level:
Emerging

How does it work?

  1. 1. Know which engines use IndexNow

    Participants are Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, Internet Archive and Amazonbot; Google is not listed, so keep your XML sitemap for Google.

  2. 2. Turn on a built-in integration first

    On Cloudflare, enable Crawler Hints (Caching > Configuration, all plans); many CMSs (WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Duda, Drupal…) support IndexNow natively or via SEO plugins.

  3. 3. Otherwise create and host a key file

    Generate a key of 8–128 characters (a–z, A–Z, 0–9, dashes) and publish it as UTF-8 text at https://yoursite.com/{key}.txt.

  4. 4. Submit URLs when content changes

    Send GET https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=…&key=… for one URL, or POST JSON {host, key, urlList} with up to 10,000 URLs.

  5. 5. Send only real changes

    Submit added, updated or deleted URLs only; do not resubmit unchanged URLs, and avoid sending the same URL more than once a day.

  6. 6. Check responses and Bing's IndexNow report

    Expect HTTP 200 or 202 (403 = key not found); then open Bing Webmaster Tools > IndexNow to see submitted, crawled and indexed URLs.