What Is the Best Tool to Submit URLs via IndexNow?

First, what IndexNow actually is

IndexNow is an open protocol, introduced in October 2021 by Microsoft Bing and Yandex. Instead of waiting for a crawler to rediscover your page, you tell participating engines directly that a URL changed. Mechanically it is two things: a text file at your domain root containing a key — https://example.com/{key}.txt — proving you control the host; and an HTTP POST containing your host, that key, and up to 10,000 URLs. That's the whole protocol. No account, no API contract, no rate-limited vendor key. Which is the first thing worth internalising: you are not paying anyone for access to IndexNow. Any tool charging you is charging for convenience around it.

Who actually receives it

The authoritative list lives at indexnow.org/searchengines.json. At the time of writing it names seven participants: Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Yep, Amazon, and the Internet Archive. Google is not on that list. Google announced in November 2021 that it would test IndexNow. It never adopted it. There is no Google IndexNow endpoint, and submitting to the shared endpoint forwards nothing to Google. If your traffic is overwhelmingly Google, calibrate accordingly — IndexNow is a supplement, not a strategy. That said, the reach is wider than "Bing's market share" suggests: Bing's index also powers Microsoft Copilot and supplies most of DuckDuckGo's results.

The criterion nobody evaluates on

Here's the thing that actually separates good tools from bad ones, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice.

The shared IndexNow endpoint, Bing and Yandex all return 202 Accepted for any well-formed submission — including one whose key file was never published anywhere. They validate the key afterwards, asynchronously. If that check fails, the submission is silently discarded. Nobody emails you. Meanwhile Naver, Seznam, Yep and Amazon validate during the request and return 403 immediately for that same broken setup. So one misconfigured key produces "success" on three engines and "failure" on four. This is the most common reason people conclude IndexNow "doesn't work" — their submissions were being thrown away for weeks while a dashboard showed green ticks.

202 Accepted means "I have received this and will deal with it later." It is an acknowledgement of receipt, not a confirmation of anything. Much of this category renders it as a checkmark. So the question to ask of any IndexNow tool is: does it check my key file before submitting, or does it just report whatever the endpoint said?

The actual options

How to tell whether yours is working

Whichever option you pick, verify it once instead of trusting a green tick:

1. Open your key file in a private window. https://yourdomain.com/{key}.txt should return plain text containing exactly your key and nothing else. If your CMS renders a 404 page here with a 200 — which WordPress does readily — validation fails.
2. Submit to a synchronous engine. Naver, Seznam, Yep and Amazon validate during the request. A success from one of those tells you the key genuinely resolved.
3. Check Bing Webmaster Tools a day later to see whether submissions are landing.

The verdict

The best IndexNow tool for most people is the one already sitting in their CMS, switched on and then verified once. The protocol is free and open, the endpoints are public, and anything charging you is selling convenience — a legitimate thing to sell, but you should know that's what you're buying.

I build Instant IndexNow, which verifies your key file before submitting and reports each engine's response separately. Free tier, no account. I'd rather you used the Cloudflare toggle if it's a better fit — it usually is.