What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an open protocol: when a page is added, changed or deleted, the site notifies search engines directly instead of waiting for a crawler to rediscover it. The official documentation (indexnow.org, checked 2026-11) describes sending a request to a search engine's endpoint with the URL and your key; one request can submit up to 10,000 URLs in a batch.
It is only a “notification” and does not guarantee indexing. The documentation says a 200 response only means the search engine received the submission, not that the pages have been indexed; each engine decides whether and when to crawl.
Which search engines use IndexNow?
The FAQ page on indexnow.org (checked 2026-11) lists these participating engines: Amazon, Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex, Yep. There is also a shared endpoint, api.indexnow.org, which passes submissions to all participating engines; the documentation also says a submission to one participating engine is automatically shared with the others.
Neither documentation page mentions Google. Google uses sitemaps and its own Search Console; do not treat IndexNow as a way to notify Google.
| Who you want to notify | What to use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yep, Amazon | IndexNow | indexnow.org FAQ page, checked 2026-11 |
| Sitemap plus Search Console | The IndexNow documentation page does not mention Google | |
| OpenAI and Perplexity crawlers | No public statement | Neither company's crawler documentation page mentions IndexNow, sitemaps or lastmod, checked 2026-11 |
Does IndexNow matter for AI search?
Indirectly, and the only official statement is from Bing: in its 2025-07-31 Webmaster Blog post, Bing says IndexNow is a real-time complement to sitemaps, notifying Bing and participating engines when pages are added, updated or removed; freshness signals affect how quickly updates show up in search results and AI-generated answers; and it also says no tool can guarantee when or how content will appear in AI-generated results.
In other words, IndexNow can make Bing learn faster that your page changed; whether Bing's AI answers cite it, Bing itself says it cannot guarantee. As for ChatGPT and Perplexity, neither OpenAI's nor Perplexity's crawler documentation mentions IndexNow, so we do not say it helps with those two. For ChatGPT and Bing, see does ChatGPT use Bing.
A real setup: MochiStamp pushes automatically after every deploy
When page content has changed, MochiStamp's deploy script runs a very short script after going live. It works in four steps:
The key is public, and the site serves it itself
The key file is a route on the site at /<key>.txt that returns the key itself. An IndexNow key is public by design; it proves the URLs belong to you.
Self-check before pushing
The script first requests the live /<key>.txt and stops if the content differs from the key, saying “the site does not serve the key yet, deploy first”. That way no notification goes out before the new version is live.
Read the live sitemap and send everything at once
The script reads the live sitemap.xml, extracts all URLs and POSTs them to api.indexnow.org with host, key, keyLocation and the URL list. A 200 or 202 counts as success; 403 means the key was not found, and 422 means some URL does not belong to this domain.
Push only after deploys that changed pages
The deploy script checks which files this change touched: it pushes only for templates, page content, copy and sample images, and not for deploys that changed only back-end logic.
There is one thing to improve: each time it sends every URL in the whole sitemap, which was 196 in the 2026-10-30 record. indexnow.org recommends submitting only URLs whose content changed and not resubmitting unchanged ones. MochiStamp's sitemap carries a trustworthy last-modified time for every URL, so the next step could be to send only those whose lastmod just changed; see how to write a trustworthy sitemap lastmod.
For the effect of this setup we only have Bing Webmaster Tools numbers, and we cannot say they came from IndexNow (there was no control with it switched off): Bing's count of indexed MochiStamp pages was 14 on 2026-10-30, 23 on 10-31 and 27 on 11-01; pages Bing crawled per day were 20 on 10-28, 52 on 10-29, 39 on 10-30, 8 on 10-31 and 33 on 11-01.
How do you add IndexNow to your own site?
1. Generate a key and put it in the root
A key is 8 to 128 characters of letters, digits or dashes. Create a UTF-8 text file named key.txt (replace key with your key), containing only that key, put it in the site root, and make sure a browser can open it.
2. Send one request after a page update
Put the changed URLs in urlList and send a POST request. The format is:
POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 { "host": "example.com", "key": "5c0f3b9e7a2d4e61b8f9c3a1d7e2f604", "keyLocation": "https://example.com/5c0f3b9e7a2d4e61b8f9c3a1d7e2f604.txt", "urlList": [ "https://example.com/pricing/", "https://example.com/guides/new-page/" ] }3. Submit only the URLs that changed
Submit only pages that were added, changed or deleted. Resubmitting unchanged pages is, according to the documentation, a common cause of 422 responses.
4. Wire it into your deploy process
Send it after the deploy is finished and the live checks pass, as the last step in the script. Many CMSs and hosting platforms have ready-made plugins or switches you can use instead.
5. Keep the sitemap too
The documentation recommends using both: IndexNow quickly notifies engines of changed pages, and the sitemap provides the complete URL list. Google reads only the sitemap.
IndexNow solves “how fast search engines learn a page changed”. It cannot solve whether crawlers can get in or whether the text can be read. For those two, see AI visibility audit checklist.
FAQ
Does IndexNow notify Google?
No. Neither the IndexNow documentation nor its FAQ page mentions Google, and it is not among the participating engines. Google uses sitemaps and Search Console.
Will a page be indexed for sure once I submit it to IndexNow?
No. A 200 response only means the search engine received the submission; each engine decides whether to crawl and index.
Can IndexNow make ChatGPT cite my new page faster?
There is no public statement. Neither OpenAI's nor Perplexity's crawler documentation mentions IndexNow. Only Bing has said that freshness signals affect how fast updates appear in search results and in its AI answers.
Should I submit the whole sitemap on every deploy?
No, and it is not recommended. indexnow.org recommends submitting only URLs whose content changed; resubmitting unchanged URLs is a common cause of 422 responses.
If I have IndexNow, do I still need a sitemap?
Yes. The documentation recommends using both: IndexNow notifies engines of changed pages, the sitemap provides the complete URL list, and Google reads only the sitemap.
Sources
- IndexNow · Documentation （checked 2026-11-05）
- IndexNow · FAQ （checked 2026-11-05）
- Bing · Keeping Content Discoverable with Sitemaps in AI Powered Search （Published 2025-07-31, checked 2026-11-05）
- OpenAI · Overview of OpenAI Crawlers （checked 2026-11-05）
- Perplexity · Perplexity Crawlers （checked 2026-11-05）
- MochiStamp · tools/indexnow.py 和部署脚本（MochiStamp 仓库）；Bing Webmaster Tools 数字 （Data from 2026-10-28 to 11-01, read 2026-11-05）
- kagentx evaluations: the data on the case study pages; each example gives its date.