IndexNow
A publishing ping that tells participating search engines a URL changed now, instead of waiting for their crawlers to notice.
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What it is
IndexNow is a push protocol for telling participating search engines that a URL was added, updated, or deleted. Instead of waiting for a bot to rediscover the change, your publishing system sends the URL to the IndexNow API as soon as the change ships. Bing and Yandex introduced the protocol in 2021 to turn recrawling from a guessing game into a notification.
It earns its keep on sites where freshness matters: news, product stock and prices, job listings, event pages, and large catalogs with frequent deletions. Prove control of the host with a text key file, then submit single URLs or batch them through https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow. Sites on Cloudflare can skip the plumbing entirely: the Crawler Hints setting sends IndexNow notifications from the edge. A successful response means the notification was accepted, not that the page was crawled or indexed.
The trap is wiring it to every build instead of every content change. Pinging 40,000 unchanged URLs each deploy adds noise and earns nothing. Trigger it from actual create, update, and delete events, send the final canonical URL after redirects settle, retry temporary failures with backoff, and keep your XML sitemap because IndexNow complements normal discovery rather than replacing it.
Ask AI for it
Add IndexNow to this publishing pipeline. Generate a protocol key, serve it as a UTF-8 text file at /<key>.txt, and POST changed URLs to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow with the host, key, keyLocation, and urlList fields from the IndexNow API. Trigger submissions only after a successful create, update, or delete deployment; use the final canonical URL; batch no more than 10,000 URLs per request; deduplicate the queue; and retry 429 and 5xx responses with exponential backoff. Log response status and URL count without logging the key, and keep the XML sitemap generation unchanged.