IndexNow: What It Is, Why It Matters for AI, and How to Use It With Bing
Updated: Aug 10
Key takeaways
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Most teams publish a page and then wait. Sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, with no visibility into whether anything is happening. That waiting period used to be a mild annoyance. Now it is the gap between publishing and being eligible for citation in an answer engine, which makes it a commercial problem rather than a technical one.
IndexNow closes that gap. It is one of the few genuinely free, genuinely fast wins left in technical SEO, and it takes minutes to turn on. On some platforms it is a single toggle.
With that said, let's dig in to what the protocol actually does, which engines honor it, how to set it up on the platforms most B2B teams run, how to confirm it is working, and, just as importantly, what it will not do for you no matter how many URLs you push through it.
What is IndexNow
IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website notify participating search engines the instant a URL is created, updated, or deleted. Instead of waiting for a crawler to return on its own schedule, your site pushes the change and the engine responds in near real time. |
One clarification before we go further, because these two things get conflated constantly and the confusion costs people weeks. IndexNow is a notification protocol, not an indexing service. It tells the engine a URL changed. Whether the engine then crawls it, and whether it keeps the page once it has, is a separate question I cover in Bing indexing. IndexNow controls the speed of the conversation, not the outcome.
The mechanics are deliberately simple. You generate a key, host it as a text file at your root, and then your site sends a small request containing the changed URL and that key whenever something publishes. The engine verifies the key belongs to your domain and queues the URL. There is no dashboard to log into and no quota to manage.
Microsoft and Yandex launched the protocol in 2021 and opened it to any engine that wanted to participate. Adoption tells the story better than the announcement did. Bing reports more than 3.5 billion URLs a day flowing through it, and says 18% of newly clicked URLs in its results arrived through the protocol rather than through conventional crawling.
Which search engines support IndexNow
Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam participate, and because the protocol shares submissions across members, one ping reaches all of them. Google evaluated IndexNow and does not currently support it, so you still rely on conventional crawling and Search Console for Google. |
People search for this as "Bing IndexNow" far more often than as IndexNow, which makes sense. Microsoft drove the protocol, Bing is the engine most people are trying to reach, and for practical purposes on a Western B2B site Bing is the participating engine that matters. Same protocol, same key, same ping.
Google's absence is worth understanding rather than lamenting. Google tested the protocol and concluded its own crawl scheduling already handled discovery adequately at its scale. That is probably true for Google and entirely irrelevant to your problem, because the engine you need for AI retrieval is the one that does support it.
This is the part that reframes the protocol. Five years ago, a push protocol that reached Bing but not Google was a footnote. Today Bing is the retrieval layer behind ChatGPT search and Copilot, which means IndexNow reaches the engines answering your buyers' questions and skips the one that mostly sends you traffic. The value proposition inverted without the protocol changing at all.
Why does IndexNow matter for AI search
ChatGPT search and Microsoft Copilot retrieve through Bing, so how quickly Bing learns about your page determines how quickly that page can be cited. IndexNow compresses the publish to eligibility window from weeks to hours, which matters most for timely content where being first is the entire point. |
The compounding effect is easy to miss. A page that becomes eligible today starts accumulating retrieval opportunities today. A page that waits three weeks loses three weeks of them permanently, and you never see the loss because nothing reports it.
This matters disproportionately for reactive content. A response to an industry announcement, a take on a competitor's launch, a page addressing a question that just started getting asked. That content has a short window where being retrievable is worth something, and conventional crawl scheduling will frequently miss it entirely on a low authority domain.
Set expectations correctly though, because this is where people get disappointed. IndexNow gets you into the queue faster. It does not improve your ranking on Bing, and ranking is what determines whether an answer engine actually selects your page from the candidate pool. Being eligible sooner is worth having. It is not the same as being cited.
How do you set up IndexNow
Generate an API key, host it as a text file at your domain root, then configure your platform or CMS to send a ping containing the changed URL and key on every publish. Most major platforms have a native toggle or a plugin, which reduces the whole job to a few minutes. |
On Wix. Native and automatic. The platform handles key generation and pings on publish with no code and no plugin. Confirm it is enabled in your SEO settings and you are done.
On WordPress. Install the official IndexNow plugin or use the built in support in the major SEO plugins. All of them generate and host the key for you and fire on post publish and update.
On a custom stack. Generate a key of 8 to 128 hexadecimal characters, host it at yourdomain.com/yourkey.txt containing only the key, and send a GET or POST to the IndexNow endpoint on publish. Batch submissions are supported, which is the efficient path if you are backfilling a library.
On any platform. Set the API key inside Bing Webmaster Tools as well, under Settings. This is the fastest route if you would rather not touch your root directory, and it also gives you a place to confirm the key registered.
One sequencing note that saves a lot of frustration. Push a URL after its internal links are live, not before. The ping gets the crawler to your page quickly, but internal links are what convince the engine the page belongs to a coherent library rather than sitting alone. Pushing an orphaned page just gets it crawled and declined faster.
How do you verify IndexNow is working
Check the IndexNow report inside Bing Webmaster Tools for submission counts and status, load your key file in a browser to confirm it resolves, and watch your server logs for crawler activity shortly after publishing. If submissions register but pages stay unindexed, the problem is quality or discovery rather than the protocol. |
Confirm the key resolves. Load yourdomain.com/yourkey.txt in a browser. It should return the key as plain text with a 200 status. A 404 here is the single most common setup failure and it silently invalidates every submission you send.
Check the submission report. Bing Webmaster Tools shows how many URLs you have pushed and their status. If the count is zero after publishing, your platform is not firing. If the count is healthy, the protocol side is working and any remaining problem lives elsewhere.
Watch the logs. A successful push typically brings a crawler to the URL within hours rather than days. Server logs are the honest record, and the split between training crawlers and live retrieval agents there tells you more about AI consumption than any dashboard will.
If submissions register cleanly and pages still are not appearing, stop troubleshooting the protocol. The protocol did its job. What you have is a crawl quality or discovery problem, and the diagnostic path for that runs through Bing indexing rather than back through here.
What IndexNow does not do
IndexNow doesn't improve rankings, doesn't guarantee indexation, doesn't replace your sitemap, and doesn't reach Google. It accelerates discovery on participating engines and nothing more. A weak page pushed instantly is still a weak page. |
I'm spending a section on this because the protocol gets oversold, and oversold tools produce disappointed teams who then abandon things that were working. Speed of discovery is genuinely valuable. It is also narrow.
It doesn't improve rankings. Engines have said so directly and the mechanism makes it obvious. A notification tells the engine to look. It says nothing about what the engine finds when it arrives.
It doesn't guarantee indexation. Pushing a thin, duplicate, or orphaned page gets it
evaluated and declined faster than waiting would have. If you push a large batch of low quality URLs you are demonstrating a pattern to the engine, and that is not a pattern you want to demonstrate.
It doesn't replace your sitemap. Sitemaps describe your full library and are how an engine understands structure. IndexNow describes individual changes. They answer different questions and you want both.
Used correctly it is one of the highest return technical moves available to a B2B site right now, precisely because it is free, fast, and almost nobody has bothered. Just hold it to what it actually promises.
Publishing into a queue nobody is reading? We audit the full publish to citation path, from push protocol through indexation to retrieval, at the start of every AI visibility engagement. Book 30 minutes with MQL Magnet and we will find where yours breaks. |
Frequently asked questions
What is IndexNow?
An open protocol launched by Microsoft Bing and Yandex in 2021 that lets websites push new, updated, and deleted URLs directly to search engines the moment content changes, instead of waiting to be crawled.
Which search engines use IndexNow?
Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam participate, and submissions are shared between them, so one ping notifies all participating engines. Google does not support the protocol.
Does Google support IndexNow?
No. Google has tested the protocol but has not adopted it, and continues to rely on crawling, sitemaps, and Search Console requests for regular content discovery.
How does IndexNow help with ChatGPT visibility?
ChatGPT search retrieves from Bing’s index, and research shows its citations overwhelmingly track Bing’s top results. IndexNow gets pages into that index within hours, making them citable the day they publish.
How do I set up IndexNow on Wix?
Enable the native IndexNow toggle in your site’s SEO settings. Wix then pushes new and updated URLs automatically on publish, with no API key management or code required.
How do I set up IndexNow on WordPress?
Use a plugin that includes it, such as Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO, or Microsoft’s official IndexNow plugin, and enable the feature in the plugin settings.
Does IndexNow improve rankings?
Not directly. It accelerates discovery and indexing, which gets eligible pages into results and AI retrieval pools sooner. Ranking still depends on content quality, relevance, and authority.
How do I know if IndexNow is working?
Check the IndexNow report in Bing Webmaster Tools for submitted URLs and their crawl and index outcomes, and confirm in Site Explorer that pushed pages entered Bing’s index.
Is IndexNow free?
Yes. The protocol is open and free, the API key costs nothing, and platform integrations on Wix, WordPress plugins, and Cloudflare add no charge for it.
Does IndexNow replace sitemaps?
No. Sitemaps remain the full inventory map engines use for comprehensive discovery, while IndexNow handles real time change notification. Run both.
What happens if I push low quality pages through IndexNow?
They get evaluated faster and rejected faster. The protocol removes discovery delay but leaves quality evaluation untouched, so exclusions like crawled but not indexed still apply.
