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What IndexNow is, and which search engines it reaches

IndexNow lets your site tell Bing, Yandex and other engines the moment a page changes. Here is how it works, and why Google is not on the list.

5 May 20263 min read

Waiting to be crawled

Search engines find new and changed pages by crawling. They reread your sitemap, follow links and come back to pages on their own schedule. That can take hours or weeks, depending on the engine and how often it visits your site.

For a site that publishes often, or changes prices, dates and offers, the gap matters. A hotel's weekend offer is no use in the index a week after the weekend.

How IndexNow works

IndexNow is an open protocol that Microsoft Bing and Yandex launched in 2021. Instead of waiting for a crawler, your site tells the engines which URLs changed.

It takes three steps:

  1. Create a key of 8 to 128 characters, using letters, numbers and dashes.
  2. Serve that key in a text file at https://yoursite.com/<key>.txt, so an engine can check that the notice came from the site owner.
  3. When a page is added, changed or deleted, send its URL and the key to an IndexNow endpoint.

One URL can go as a simple GET request. Several go as one POST with JSON:

POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "host": "yoursite.com",
  "key": "your-key",
  "urlList": [
    "https://yoursite.com/offers/weekend-break",
    "https://yoursite.com/rooms"
  ]
}

Engines that take part share submissions with each other, so one call reaches all of them. The notice is a hint. Each engine still decides when to crawl the URL and whether to index it.

Who takes part, and who does not

Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver take part, among others. Microsoft Copilot also draws on Bing for its answers from the web.

Google does not take part. For Google, the options are a sitemap with accurate lastmod values and the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, where you can ask for a single URL to be crawled by hand. Google's Indexing API exists but only accepts job postings and livestream pages.

Who gains most

  • News and magazine sites that publish several articles a day
  • Shops where prices and stock change often
  • Event sites with dates and ticket sales
  • Hotels and restaurants with short-lived offers

A site that changes once a month gains less. It still costs nothing to have each change announced when it happens.

IndexNow in AI Boost for Joomla

Setting it up by hand means making a key, serving the key file and hooking the submission into Joomla's content events.

In AI Boost for Joomla the IndexNow section sits on the AI Discovery screen. Switch on Enable IndexNow, press Generate to create a key, switch on Auto-submit URLs on article publish / update, and save. From then on AI Boost serves the key file at /<key>.txt and sends an article's URL to api.indexnow.org when you save the article or change whether it is published. It covers Joomla articles only.

There is no button to submit the whole site at once, and nothing it sends reaches Google.