IndexNow
IndexNow is a publisher-side protocol that lets a website notify search engines instantly when content is added or changed — supported by Bing, Yandex, Yep, Naver, and Seznam with a single ping.
Before IndexNow, search engines had to crawl your sitemap and detect changes on their own — typically a delay of hours to weeks. IndexNow lets you POST a JSON list of URLs to one endpoint and the participating search engines pick it up within seconds. Google does not directly participate in 2026 but uses similar Indexing API mechanisms for select content types. For publishers shipping fresh AI-search content (comparisons, glossary, blog posts), IndexNow ping on publish is one of the cheapest freshness signals you can wire up.
When to use indexnow
- Any publisher with regularly-changing content.
- Especially: news, evergreen content with rolling updates, AI-search citation pages.
Common mistakes
- Pinging stale URLs — wastes budget and trains the engine to ignore your pings.
- Forgetting the public key file at /<key>.txt — pings will be rejected.
FAQ
What is indexnow?
IndexNow is a publisher-side protocol that lets a website notify search engines instantly when content is added or changed — supported by Bing, Yandex, Yep, Naver, and Seznam with a single ping.
When should I use indexnow?
Any publisher with regularly-changing content. Especially: news, evergreen content with rolling updates, AI-search citation pages.
What are the most common mistakes with indexnow?
Pinging stale URLs — wastes budget and trains the engine to ignore your pings. Forgetting the public key file at /<key>.txt — pings will be rejected.
Related terms
- AI search engine — An AI search engine answers a user's query by retrieving relevant web sources and synthesising a cited answer with a language model — the category that includes Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, Claude with web, and Gemini AI Overviews.
Sources
Last updated: 2026-06-01. Raw markdown: https://promtable.com/glossary/indexnow.md.