Does Google Support IndexNow?
No. Here is the full picture, from a site that sells IndexNow submissions and therefore has every commercial reason to tell you otherwise.
Quick answer
Google does not participate in IndexNow. It announced a test in November 2021 and never adopted the protocol. There is no Google IndexNow endpoint, and the shared endpoint does not forward to Google. IndexNow reaches Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Yep and Amazon. For Google, the only direct submission route is URL Inspection in Search Console.
Why this question keeps coming up
In November 2021, shortly after Microsoft and Yandex launched IndexNow, Google said it would test the protocol across its own systems to evaluate whether it improved crawl efficiency. That announcement was widely reported. What was not widely reported is that nothing came of it.
Years later, Google still does not accept IndexNow submissions. The 2021 coverage is still indexed, still ranking, and still being cited by tools and blog posts as though adoption happened. That is the entire reason this page exists.
A number of paid "instant indexing" services quietly lean on this confusion. They accept your Google URLs, submit them via IndexNow, and report success — which is technically accurate about the request and completely misleading about the outcome.
What Google actually offers
URL Inspection in Search Console
The only direct "please look at this now" mechanism Google offers for ordinary pages. One URL at a time, rate-limited to a small number per day, and a request rather than a guarantee. Genuinely useful for a new or substantially changed page; not a strategy for a site with thousands of URLs.
Sitemaps
A standing list of what you consider important, re-read periodically. Keeping
lastmod accurate genuinely helps
Google prioritise; stamping every URL with today's date on every deploy is a known way to have
the field ignored entirely.
The Indexing API — narrower than it sounds
Google does publish an Indexing API, which is why people assume there is a general submission
route. It officially accepts only pages carrying
JobPosting or
BroadcastEvent structured data.
Submitting ordinary pages is outside its documented scope, and Google has stated it does not act
on those submissions.
Links from pages Google already crawls
Unglamorous and still the most reliable mechanism there is. A new page linked from a page Google visits daily gets found quickly, without any submission at all.
Who does receive IndexNow submissions
The protocol is real and works well — for the engines that implement it. One submission to the shared endpoint reaches all of them.
| Engine | Why it may matter to you |
|---|---|
| Bing | Also powers Copilot and supplies most of DuckDuckGo's results, so the reach is wider than Bing's own share suggests. |
| Yandex | Co-author of the protocol. Dominant in Russia and significant across parts of Eastern Europe. |
| Naver | The leading search engine in South Korea. |
| Seznam | Meaningful share in the Czech Republic. |
| Yep | Smaller independent index, run by Ahrefs. |
| Amazon | Operates its own crawler for product and content discovery. |
Worth knowing if you are debugging: the shared endpoint, Bing and Yandex all return
202 Accepted before validating your
key, while Naver, Seznam, Yep and Amazon validate during the request and return
403 if it fails. The same broken setup
therefore looks successful on three engines and broken on four.
Should you use IndexNow at all?
Do the arithmetic honestly. Open Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and look at what share of your traffic comes from the engines above. For most English-language sites that is a single-digit percentage; for sites with Russian, Korean or Czech audiences it can be much larger.
IndexNow speeds up discovery for that share and does nothing for the rest. Setup costs one text file and one HTTP request, and running it costs nothing, so the bar for it being worthwhile is low. But it is not a Google strategy, and anyone selling it as one is not being straight with you.