IndexNow vs the Google Indexing API
Two protocols that get confused constantly, run by different organisations, reaching entirely different search engines. There is no overlap.
Last reviewed 2026-08-21. We build one of the tools compared here; where another does the job better, this page says so.
Short answer
They are unrelated and do not compete. IndexNow reaches Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Yep and Amazon. The Google Indexing API reaches Google and officially accepts only JobPosting and BroadcastEvent pages.
So the question is not which to choose. Use IndexNow for the engines that implement it, and for Google use a sitemap plus Search Console. The Indexing API is relevant only if you actually publish job listings or livestream events.
Side by side
| IndexNow | Google Indexing API | |
|---|---|---|
| Run by | Open protocol, originated by Microsoft and Yandex | |
| Reaches | Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Yep, Amazon (and the Internet Archive) | Google only |
| Reaches Google? | No: announced a test in Nov 2021, never adopted | Yes |
| Eligible pages | Any URL on a host you control | Officially JobPosting and BroadcastEvent only |
| Authentication | A plain text key file at your domain root. No account | OAuth service account via Google Cloud |
| Batch size | Up to 10,000 URLs per request | 100 URLs per batch request |
| Failure reporting | 202 from most engines regardless of key validity; 403 from the four that validate synchronously | Errors returned directly in the API response |
| Cost | Free | Free, with quota |
The confusion is worth naming
These two get conflated constantly, and tools encourage it. "instant indexing" is used as a product category covering both, which leaves people believing an IndexNow submission does something at Google. It does not. Google announced it would test IndexNow in November 2021 and has never adopted it; there is a fuller account of that here.
The practical consequence: if your traffic is overwhelmingly from Google, IndexNow will not move it. That is not an argument against using IndexNow (it is free and Bing feeds ChatGPT search, DuckDuckGo and Copilot) but it is an argument against expecting it to fix a Google problem. For those, start with why Google is not indexing the page.
What each one actually does
Both operate on discovery: telling an engine a URL exists or changed, so it does not have to wait to find out by recrawling. Neither operates on indexing. An engine that receives your submission, crawls the page and decides not to index it has behaved exactly as designed. Submission removes a delay; it does not cast a vote.
If a page is not being indexed, submitting it repeatedly changes nothing. Check whether it is indexable first: status, robots.txt, meta robots, X-Robots-Tag and canonical, because a submitted page carrying a noindex is a submission spent on a page you have told them not to keep.