Table of Contents

• What IndexNow is, without the marketing spin
• Who actually supports it (and who does not)
• Why it helps a business

  • 1. Bing stopped being “the other search engine” and became an AI gateway
  • 2. Time-sensitive content stops arriving late
  • 3. You stop wasting crawl budget
  • 4. Markets where Google is not in charge
• How to set it up: three routes

  • Route 1: check whether you already have it
  • Route 2: a plugin (for CMSs)
  • Route 3: the API (for custom sites)
  • Automating it
• What IndexNow does not do
• How to measure whether it was worth it
• Frequently asked questions
• So, is it worth it?
• Sources

What IndexNow is, without the marketing spin

Traditional indexing works on a pull model: the search engine decides when to visit you. You publish a sitemap, wait, and the crawler arrives whenever it does, based on your domain’s authority and how often you tend to make changes.

IndexNow reverses that. It is push: the moment you publish, update, or delete a URL, your site notifies search engines: “this URL changed; come look at it.” The search engine receives that signal almost in real time and prioritizes the URL in its crawl queue.

Technically, it is almost suspiciously simple. Generate a key, publish it in a text file on your domain (that is the entire ownership check), then make an HTTP request containing the URLs that changed. No OAuth, no expiring tokens, no SDK. Microsoft and Yandex created it in 2021 as an open standard: a URL submitted to one participating search engine is automatically shared with the others.

Who actually supports it (and who does not)

This is where it pays to be honest, because plenty of guides imply otherwise.

Google does not support IndexNow. Full stop. It has said it was “evaluating” the protocol since October 2021 and, as of August 2026, has not adopted it. If someone sells you IndexNow as a way to show up faster on Google, they either do not know what they are talking about or hope you do not. For Google, you still rely on the usual: a clean sitemap, Search Console, internal links, and a site that deserves to be crawled frequently.

What does support it:

Search engine	Why it matters
Bing	Protocol co-creator. The one that matters most for reasons we will see below.
Yandex	Co-creator. Dominant in Russia and much of Central Asia.
Naver	South Korea’s leading search engine, ahead of Google in that market.
Seznam	Czech national search engine with meaningful share in the Czech Republic.
Yep	Ahrefs’ privacy-focused search engine.

By the numbers, the protocol is no longer an experiment: more than 5 billion URLs are submitted every day, tens of millions of sites use it, and Microsoft reports that roughly one fifth of new URLs that receive clicks in Bing arrived through this route.

Why it helps a business

1. Bing stopped being “the other search engine” and became an AI gateway

This is the reason that changed the calculation over the past two years—and the one almost nobody considered when IndexNow launched.

Microsoft Copilot runs natively on Bing’s index. ChatGPT web search retrieves results from that same index. Perplexity also partly relies on it. In other words: if your page is not in Bing’s index, it does not exist as a citeable source for a meaningful share of AI-assistant traffic, no matter how well it ranks on Google.

Here is the detail that makes this interesting for a company: almost nobody is competing for that surface. The market’s entire SEO budget points at Google. Bing remains comparatively inexpensive to win. IndexNow is the fastest, most direct way to make sure what you publish enters that index in hours rather than weeks.

2. Time-sensitive content stops arriving late

For some businesses, indexing speed is the product: job boards, ecommerce stores with variable stock and prices, real-estate portals, news outlets, and agencies publishing offers or availability. For all of them, a page indexed three days late is a page that is already useless.

IndexNow also works for the opposite action, which is often overlooked: notifying search engines of deletions. When you discontinue a product or a job opening, submitting that URL helps stop it from appearing in results and sending people to a 404. That is user experience and reputation.

3. You stop wasting crawl budget

Every site has a crawl budget: a limited number of pages a search engine is willing to crawl over a period. Without IndexNow, much of that budget is spent rechecking pages that did not change, just in case they did.

With IndexNow, you tell it exactly what to inspect. The budget concentrates on what is genuinely new. On a 200-page site, this is irrelevant. On a site with 50,000 SKUs, it is the difference between having an up-to-date catalog in the index and not having one.

4. Markets where Google is not in charge

If your company sells—or wants to sell—in South Korea, Russia, the Czech Republic, or much of Eastern Europe, Google is not the dominant engine. Naver, Yandex, or Seznam is. All three support IndexNow. One implementation covers those markets without integrating three separate APIs.

How to set it up: three routes

Route 1: check whether you already have it

Before touching anything, check. Several platforms already submit to IndexNow by default without you realizing it: Wix Studio, Duda, GoDaddy’s website builder, XenForo, and Milestone. Cloudflare does too if you enable Crawler Hints in its dashboard—it is literally a toggle.

To verify it, open Bing Webmaster Tools, connect your site, and look at the IndexNow section. If URLs are already arriving, you are done and can close this guide.

Route 2: a plugin (for CMSs)

If you use a common CMS, this takes five minutes and no code.

On WordPress, there is the official IndexNow plugin, and it is also built into Yoast, RankMath, AIOSEO, and SEOPress. If you already use one of them, you will probably just need to tick a box. Shopify has InstaIndex. Equivalent extensions exist for Drupal, PrestaShop, Joomla, Shopware, TYPO3, OpenCart, MODX, and Umbraco.

Route 3: the API (for custom sites)

If your site is built with Next.js, Astro, Laravel, Rails, or anything custom, there are four steps.

Step 1. Generate a key. A hexadecimal string between 8 and 128 characters. Generate one on Bing’s page or from your terminal:

openssl rand -hex 16

Step 2. Publish it on your domain. Create a UTF-8 text file whose name is the key and whose content is also the key, then make it available at your root:

https://tudominio.com/a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6.txt

That file is the entire ownership check. Nobody who does not control your server can submit URLs on your behalf.

Step 3. Submit the URLs. A GET is enough for one URL. For several, send a POST to api.indexnow.org:

POST /IndexNow HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Host: api.indexnow.org

{
  "host": "tudominio.com",
  "key": "a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6",
  "keyLocation": "https://tudominio.com/a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://tudominio.com/blog/articulo-nuevo",
    "https://tudominio.com/producto/123"
  ]
}

You can submit up to 10,000 URLs per request. The responses that matter:

Code	Meaning
200	Successfully received.
400	Invalid JSON format.
403	The key is invalid, or the file exists but does not contain the key.
422	The URLs do not belong to the declared host.
429	Too many requests. You are submitting too much.

Step 4. Verify. Go back to Bing Webmaster Tools and confirm that the URLs are arriving. Do not assume it works just because the code did not error.

Automating it

Submitting URLs by hand does not scale, and you will forget. The whole point of IndexNow is to trigger it automatically. Hook it into your CMS publishing event, a build webhook, or a step at the end of your deployment. The JavaScript logic is as simple as this:

async function notificarIndexNow(urls) {
  const res = await fetch("https://api.indexnow.org/IndexNow", {
    method: "POST",
    headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json; charset=utf-8" },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      host: "tudominio.com",
      key: process.env.INDEXNOW_KEY,
      keyLocation: `https://tudominio.com/${process.env.INDEXNOW_KEY}.txt`,
      urlList: urls,
    }),
  });
  if (!res.ok) console.error("IndexNow falló:", res.status);
}

Call it when you publish, edit, and delete. Nothing more.

What IndexNow does not do

This is where most expectations collapse, so it is worth being clear.

It does not guarantee indexing. IndexNow guarantees that the search engine learns about a change. Its decision to crawl and index is still its own, and depends on the page’s quality and usefulness. Bad content indexed quickly is still bad content.

It does not improve your rankings. It is not a ranking factor. It speeds up discovery, not authority. If your page did not deserve to rank, it will simply fail to rank sooner.

It does not work for Google. We said it already, but it bears repeating because it is the costliest mistake on this list.

Do not use it to resubmit your archive. When you install it, the temptation is to send all 800 URLs on your site at once. Do not: the official recommendation is to submit only what changes from the moment you activate it. Bulk-submitting unchanged content looks like spam and can earn you a 429.

Do not trigger it on every save. If your editor saves a draft fifteen times, do not send fifteen notifications. Submit only when the URL is publicly accessible and in its final version.

How to measure whether it was worth it

Before installing it, write down how long a new URL currently takes to appear in Bing. Publish something, then search site:tudominio.com/la-url-nueva each day until it appears. That is your baseline.

After installation, repeat the experiment with three or four posts. Going from days to hours is normal. In parallel, check the IndexNow report in Bing Webmaster Tools; it shows how many URLs you submitted and how many were crawled.

If your real goal is AI visibility, the final metric is not indexing: it is whether Copilot or ChatGPT cite your domain when you ask about your topic. Test it yourself with five questions your ideal customer would ask.

Frequently asked questions

Is IndexNow useful if Google is my only goal? Not much. Google does not consume IndexNow, so its direct effect on your Google indexing is zero. It can still be worthwhile if Bing, generative AI, or markets where Naver or Yandex lead also matter to you.

Can I use it even if I already have sitemap.xml? Yes. They are not mutually exclusive. Your sitemap remains the full reference for your site; IndexNow is the specific notice of what changed right now.

Do I need a separate key for every domain or subdomain? One key per verified host. If you manage several subdomains, the simplest approach is one key for each, hosted at its own root.

So, is it worth it?

It depends on how much new content you produce.

If you publish once a month, IndexNow is a nice detail and little more. Install it because it takes half an hour, but do not expect it to transform your business.

If you publish daily, manage a changing catalog, rely on time-sensitive content, or care about being cited by AI assistants, then yes: it is one of the best effort-to-result ratios left in technical SEO. One afternoon of work, zero recurring cost, and a discovery channel most of your competitors still are not using.

The uncomfortable part is that none of this replaces what matters. IndexNow gets your content into the index sooner. What that content does once it is there is still your responsibility.

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Want to put this into practice in your project? At Transforma, we handle the execution work that makes these decisions sustainable over time.

Sources

• Bing Webmaster Tools — How to add IndexNow
• Official IndexNow documentation
• Bing Blogs — IndexNow Expands Adoption Across Industries
• Search Engine Land — Naver now supports IndexNow