IndexNow explained: the open indexing protocol Bing, Yandex, and AI search use

IndexNow is an open protocol for telling search engines about URL changes. POST a JSON body with your URL list to a single endpoint, and the engines who participate — Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver — receive it. There's no per-engine signup, no per-engine API key beyond the shared one.

Why this matters more now

Bing's retrieval index now feeds ChatGPT Search and is a major Perplexity source. "Submitting to Bing" used to be a low-priority chore — now it's a direct lever on AI assistant citations. IndexNow is the cheapest way to do it.

The protocol in 30 seconds

1. Generate a key (we generate one for you).
2. Host the key as a plain-text file at https://yourdomain.com/<key>.txt — proves you own the domain.
3. POST your URL list as JSON to https://api.indexnow.org/IndexNow.
4. Engines receive your URLs near-instantly and queue them for crawl.

// What the POST body looks like
{
  "host": "example.com",
  "key": "your-key-here",
  "keyLocation": "https://example.com/your-key-here.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://example.com/new-product-1",
    "https://example.com/new-product-2"
  ]
}

IndexNow vs Google Indexing API

• IndexNow — Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver. Open protocol. No OAuth.
• Google Indexing API — Google only. OAuth-authenticated. Officially scoped to JobPosting / BroadcastEvent (strong crawl hint for everything else).

Both, not either

These aren't competing approaches. Run both on every meaningful URL change. Google → Indexing API. Everyone else → IndexNow. That single workflow covers ~99% of search and AI search retrieval in most languages.

What IndexNow doesn't do

• Doesn't push to Google. Google publicly declined to join IndexNow. Use the Indexing API separately.
• Doesn't guarantee indexing — it's a crawl hint, not a command.
• Doesn't replace sitemap.xml. Engines still use sitemaps for full coverage; IndexNow is for change notification.

How aggressive should you be?

IndexNow has no published per-day cap as of 2026, but the engines do apply server-side rate limiting and quality scoring. Spamming IndexNow with low-quality pages can reduce how seriously your future submissions are taken. Submit URLs that actually changed or are new — not every page on your site every day.

What we do with IndexNow

IndexerNow's Bing tab handles the key file hosting, the POST formatting, and the per-property association so you don't paste the wrong URLs to the wrong key. It batches up to 10,000 URLs per call (IndexNow's documented max) and shows you per-URL acceptance.