IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website tell participating search engines, with one HTTP request, that a URL has been added, updated or deleted, so they can recrawl it sooner instead of waiting to discover the change. Microsoft Bing and Yandex created it, and Bing announced it on 18 October 2021.
How IndexNow works
A site proves it owns its domain with a key: a string of 8 to 128 letters, numbers and dashes, saved in a UTF-8 text file named after the key, normally at the site root. It then pings an IndexNow endpoint whenever a page changes. One URL goes in a simple HTTP request; up to 10,000 URLs can go in one JSON POST.
The responses confirm receipt, not indexing. A 200 means the engine received the URL, nothing more. A 202 means it was received and the key is still being verified, 403 means the key was not found or did not match, and 429 means too many requests.
Participating engines agree to share submitted URLs with each other, so one ping reaches all of them. indexnow.org names Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep as supporters, and its participant file also lists the Internet Archive and Amazonbot. Google is on neither list.
You may not need to write a request at all. The IndexNow FAQ lists native support or plugins for platforms including WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Drupal, and Cloudflare offers a native integration.
Why IndexNow matters for AI answers
Microsoft makes the link directly. In December 2025, two Bing product managers wrote that many large language models rely on data grounded in the Bing index or other search indexes, and that IndexNow helps changes such as consolidated pages or updated canonicals show up faster, which they tied to more accurate AI answers. In February 2026, introducing AI citation reporting in Bing Webmaster Tools, Bing said IndexNow helps AI systems reference the most current version of a page. That makes it part of getting cited by Microsoft Copilot.
It does not reach Google, which is not a participant. For Google, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, the route Google documents for changed pages is to request a recrawl; see how to use Google Search Console for AI search.
An example request
The protocol's documentation uses a product page. To tell engines that https://www.example.com/product.html has changed, a site sends:
https://<searchengine>/indexnow?url=https://www.example.com/product.html&key=<your-key>
The key file sits at https://www.example.com/<your-key>.txt so the engine can check it, and the IndexNow FAQ advises URL-encoding the submitted address. The shared endpoint api.indexnow.org accepts the same request.
Common misconceptions
- "IndexNow gets pages indexed." Bing says it does not guarantee that pages will be crawled or indexed. The engine still decides.
- "It works for every search engine." Google does not participate.
- "Ping as often as possible." Every submitted URL counts toward crawl quota, and the IndexNow FAQ advises waiting at least five minutes before resubmitting the same URL. Bing also says to submit only URLs that changed after you started using IndexNow, not an old backlog.