What Is IndexNow and Does Google Use It? (No, and Here Is Who Does)

By Katleen, Founder of PARCHMNT · Updated October 29, 2026

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website tell search engines the moment a page is added, changed or deleted, by sending one HTTP request. Microsoft Bing and Yandex built it in 2021, and Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver and Yep take part. Google does not use IndexNow as of October 2026; Google still finds pages through sitemaps and links.

This post is built on the IndexNow documentation and FAQ at indexnow.org, and on Microsoft Bing's own announcements from 2021, 2022 and 2025. It also draws on Google's documentation on sitemaps and recrawling, and on the pages where DuckDuckGo and Microsoft say where their results come from. We describe how we use it too, since PARCHMNT submits to IndexNow on publish.

What is IndexNow?

IndexNow is a ping. The site sends a request containing a URL and a key, and every participating search engine learns that the URL changed. The indexnow.org site calls it "a simple ping so that search engines know that a URL and its content has been added, updated, or deleted". It replaces waiting for a crawler to come back on its own schedule.

The protocol flips the usual direction. Normally a search engine pulls: it crawls your site on a schedule it sets, and a new page waits until the crawler returns. With IndexNow the site pushes, and the push reaches every engine at once. Microsoft Bing's announcement of October 18, 2021 says "by notifying one search engine you will notify all search engines that have adopted IndexNow". It adds that search engines "intend to limit crawling of websites adopting IndexNow" in the future.

Adoption grew fast. Bing reported more than 80,000 participating sites in January 2022. By August 2022 it counted "more than 16 million web sites" publishing "over 1.2 billion URLs per day to the IndexNow API". The same post credits IndexNow with 7 percent of all new URLs clicked in Bing's web results that month. Those are Bing's own figures and the latest totals we could find from Bing; its 2024 and 2025 posts describe tools, not volumes.

Does Google use IndexNow?

No, it does not. As of October 2026, Google does not take part: it is not among the search engines listed at indexnow.org, and it has never announced support. Its documentation on getting pages crawled names only sitemaps and the URL Inspection tool. The last public statement from Google was a promise to test the protocol, dated November 9, 2021.

That promise is on record. A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Journal in November 2021: "We're encouraged by work to make web crawling more efficient, and we will be testing the potential benefits of this protocol". Nothing followed. Five years on, Google's page on asking Google to recrawl your URLs still offers two routes: the URL Inspection tool for single URLs and a sitemap for many. It warns that "crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks".

Google did change one thing in the same direction. In June 2023 it retired the sitemaps "ping" endpoint, saying "the vast majority of the submissions lead to spam". It now uses the sitemap's lastmod date "as a signal for scheduling crawls to URLs that we previously discovered". So Google's answer to "tell me when a page changed" is an accurate lastmod in your sitemap, not a push. Our post on how long Google takes to index a new page covers what that means in practice.

Which search engines use IndexNow?

Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver and Yep take part directly, according to indexnow.org, and the protocol's FAQ also lists an Amazon endpoint. Beyond those, Bing's index feeds other search products. DuckDuckGo says it sources its traditional links largely from Bing, and Microsoft says Copilot queries the Bing search service when it needs the web.

You will also read that ChatGPT search draws on Bing's index. OpenAI's crawler documentation describes its own search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and does not say where its index comes from, so we do not repeat that claim. Our post on what OAI-SearchBot is covers what OpenAI does document.

How does the IndexNow key file work?

The key file proves you own the site. You choose a key of 8 to 128 characters and save it as a text file named after the key at your site's root. Every request carries the same key, so the engine can fetch the file and confirm the request came from the owner.

The documentation sets the rules. The key must be "a minimum of 8 and a maximum of 128 hexadecimal characters", drawn from lowercase letters, uppercase letters, digits and dashes. The file is a UTF-8 text file "listing the key in the file at the root directory of your website". For a key of a1b2c3d4e5f6, the file lives at https://yoursite.com/a1b2c3d4e5f6.txt and contains a1b2c3d4e5f6.

Three practical notes:

• A key belongs to one host. A bulk request names a host, and URLs outside it come back with a 422, so a blog on a subdomain is a separate submission with its own file.
• The file can live elsewhere on the same host. The documentation's second option passes a keyLocation parameter pointing at the file, which helps on platforms that cannot write to the root.
• WordPress plugins host the file for you. Bing's August 2022 post names Yoast, AIOSEO, Rank Math and SEOPress as plugins with IndexNow support, and Cloudflare and Duda as platforms that send the notices.

PARCHMNT is a writing tool that researches what ranks for a search, writes the page, checks every claim and tracks where it lands in Google and AI answers. When it publishes or updates a page on WordPress or Ghost, it uploads the key file to the customer's own site once and submits the live address. Bing is told the page exists the minute it does, and a failed notice never fails a publish.

How do you submit URLs to IndexNow?

Send a GET request for one URL or a POST for up to 10,000, to the shared endpoint api.indexnow.org or to any participating engine, and the submission is shared with all of them. The URL must be escaped as RFC 3986 requires, and the key must match the file on your site.

Single URL, as a GET:

https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://yoursite.com/new-page&key=a1b2c3d4e5f6

Many URLs go as a POST to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow with a JSON body naming the host, the key and a urlList. The documentation allows up to 10,000 URLs per POST, mixing http and https. Each URL must be escaped under RFC 3986, the IETF's URI syntax standard, which defines percent-encoding. The FAQ adds that the protocol "is not designed for submitting every URL on your site at once", except after a site-wide change such as a migration. To submit URLs to Bing alone, the same request goes to www.bing.com/indexnow.

The response codes tell you what happened:

Why does IndexNow matter if Google ignores it?

IndexNow matters because Bing's index is not only Bing. DuckDuckGo's help pages say its traditional links and images are results "which we largely source from Bing". Microsoft's documentation says Copilot "may fetch information from the Bing search service" when the web would improve an answer. A page Bing has not seen has a harder time reaching either.

Bing's own framing in June 2025 is that its index supports visibility "across Microsoft's search ecosystem, including experiences like Copilot". Speed is the second reason. Bing describes IndexNow as a protocol that "instantly alerts Bing and other IndexNow Search Engines when you add, update, or delete content". That matters most for pages whose value is time-limited: a price change, a stock notice, a correction. The third reason is cost to the engines, which Bing said in 2021 would eventually mean less crawling of sites that use it.

In our own publishing, we treat the notice as free insurance. It costs one request and Google is unaffected. Bing's IndexNow Insights report in Bing Webmaster Tools, launched in March 2024, shows which submitted URLs were crawled and indexed, so you can see whether it worked.

Does IndexNow replace sitemaps?

No, it does not. The IndexNow FAQ itself says to keep your XML sitemap: "for ongoing discovery and long-term indexing, use an XML sitemap". Bing's 2025 guidance agrees that a sitemap gives it a complete view of the site "even when using IndexNow".

The two do different jobs. A sitemap is the full list, read on the engine's schedule, and for Google it is the only list that counts. IndexNow is the interrupt: this page, right now. A site with both gets the complete picture and the fast notice. A site with only IndexNow has told Bing about the pages it remembered to submit; a site with only a sitemap waits.

The FAQ also says plainly that "submitting a URL does not guarantee immediate indexing", and that each engine makes its own indexing decisions. A push makes a faster crawl more likely; it does not get a thin page indexed.

Key takeaways

• IndexNow is a one-request notice to search engines that a URL was added, changed or deleted; Bing and Yandex created it in 2021.
• Google does not use IndexNow as of October 2026; it last promised to test it in November 2021 and relies on sitemaps, lastmod and links.
• Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver and Yep take part directly, and DuckDuckGo and Copilot draw on Bing's index.
• The key file at your site root proves ownership; a 403 means the engine could not find it.
• Keep the sitemap. IndexNow is for the page that just changed, not for the whole site.

Frequently asked questions

Does IndexNow guarantee indexing?

No, it does not. The IndexNow FAQ says "submitting a URL does not guarantee immediate indexing", only that it makes a faster crawl more likely. Each search engine still makes its own indexing decisions. The notice gets the page looked at sooner; whether it is kept depends on the page, as with any crawl.

Is there a limit on URLs per request?

The limit is 10,000 URLs in one POST request, per the documentation. The FAQ asks you not to use that to submit a whole site routinely, since the protocol is for pages that changed. It also asks you to wait at least five minutes before resubmitting a page that changed again. A 429 response means you have sent too much and risk being treated as spam.

What do the 403 and 422 responses mean?

A 403 means the key is not valid: the engine fetched your key file and did not find it, or the key inside did not match. A 422 means the URLs you sent do not belong to the host named in the request, or the key does not match the protocol's rules. Both are fixed on your side, in the file or the request, and need no appeal to the engine.

Can the key file live somewhere other than the site root?

Yes. The documentation's second option lets you host the key file at another path on the same host and pass its address in a keyLocation parameter with each request. The root is recommended because it needs no extra parameter, but the alternative exists for platforms that cannot write to the root directory.

What is IndexNow and does Google use it? The short answer

IndexNow is an open protocol that tells Bing, Yandex and their partners about a changed page in one request, and Google does not take part. Use it for Bing and everything built on Bing, keep an accurate sitemap for Google, and check the Insights report to see what was indexed. If you would rather have the notice sent for you on every publish, try one article free.