Frequently Asked Questions

IndexNow is an open submission protocol introduced by Microsoft Bing and co-developed with Yandex. It lets a site owner notify participating search engines that a URL is new or has changed, instead of waiting for a crawler to find it.

No. Google has publicly declined to adopt IndexNow, so no IndexNow tool can submit to it. Google’s own Indexing API only accepts JobPosting and BroadcastEvent pages. For Google, use Search Console’s URL Inspection tool and a healthy sitemap.

The submission tool is free with no account, up to 200 URLs per day per IP address. Paid plans add automatic sitemap watching, an authenticated API and retained delivery history: see the pricing page.

Because a success response from most engines does not mean success. The global endpoint, Bing and Yandex return 202 Accepted for any well-formed key, including one that was never published, then validate it later and silently discard the submission if it fails. We fetch the key file first so you find out immediately instead of never.

Press Generate on the homepage, or use your own. It must be 8 to 128 characters using only letters, numbers and dashes. Ours is a 32-character hexadecimal string. Publish it as a text file at your domain root to prove you control the domain.

No. The protocol requires you to publish it in a world-readable file on your own domain, so it is a proof of ownership rather than a credential. It cannot be used to change anything on your site.

The protocol allows up to 10,000 per request. We deduplicate and validate first, then split anything larger into protocol-legal batches.

Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yep and Amazon. Submitting to the global endpoint forwards to all of them in one request. Submitting to an engine directly tells you what that engine specifically said, and Naver, Seznam, Yep and Amazon check your key during the request, which is the strongest confirmation available.

Submission is not indexing. IndexNow affects how quickly an engine discovers a URL, often within hours; whether it then indexes the page depends on the engine’s assessment of your content, and it may decide not to. Nobody can promise you an indexing time.

Not directly. It helps engines discover content sooner, which is a prerequisite for ranking, but it is not a ranking signal.

Most often the host does not match. Engines only accept URLs on exactly the host you submitted: example.com and www.example.com count as different hosts. We check this before sending and tell you which URLs were skipped and why.

We report the specific problem (missing file, wrong contents, redirect, or a non-200 status) and submit nothing. You can override this with skipVerification if you know the file is about to propagate.

Only for hosts where you can publish the key file, which is the mechanism that proves control. Submitting for a host you do not control is a breach of our terms.

Plain text or CSV. One URL per line, or comma-separated.

No. It runs in any modern browser, and there is a REST API on paid plans if you want it in a pipeline.