How to use the IndexNow Submitter
- Enter your domain or sitemap URL and click Load URLs. Sitemap indexes are followed automatically, and the tool checks whether robots.txt lists your sitemap.
- Download the generated key file (for example
3f9a…c1.txt) and upload it to the root of your domain so it opens athttps://yourdomain.com/<key>.txt. Click Check key file. - Select the URLs to submit — all of them, only recently changed ones, or a filtered set — and add any extra URLs.
- Click Submit to IndexNow. A
200or202response means the search engines received your URLs.
What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website tell search engines the moment a page is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for crawlers to rediscover it. It was launched by Microsoft Bing and Yandex and is supported by Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver and Yep. Participating engines share submissions with each other, so one request to the shared endpoint reaches all of them. Bing’s index also feeds other search products, which makes IndexNow one of the fastest ways to get new pages discovered outside Google.
What happened to “ping your sitemap”?
For years you could ping google.com/ping?sitemap=… or Bing’s equivalent to announce a new sitemap. Both have been retired. Today the reliable setup is:
| Search engine | How to submit |
|---|---|
Google Search Console → Sitemaps (once), plus Sitemap: in robots.txt. Google does not support IndexNow. | |
| Bing (and Yahoo, DuckDuckGo results that use Bing) | IndexNow for instant updates; Bing Webmaster Tools for sitemaps and reports. |
| Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep | IndexNow |
| Everyone | A valid XML sitemap listed in robots.txt |
How the key file works
To stop anyone from submitting URLs for sites they don’t own, IndexNow requires a key — 8 to 128 letters, digits or dashes — and a text file on your host that contains exactly that key. Usually it lives at the root (https://example.com/<key>.txt); you can place it elsewhere on the same host and pass its location as keyLocation. Search engines fetch the file to verify each submission, and URLs from other hosts are rejected.
Response codes
| Code | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 200 | OK — URLs submitted. |
| 202 | Accepted — the key is still being validated. |
| 400 | Bad request — invalid format. |
| 403 | Key file not found or doesn’t contain the key. |
| 422 | URLs don’t belong to the host, or the key doesn’t match. |
| 429 | Too many requests — submit less often. |
Best practices
- Submit only new or changed URLs. Re-submitting your whole site every day doesn’t help and may be throttled — use the “Changed last 7 days” selection, which relies on
<lastmod>in your sitemap. - Keep
<lastmod>accurate — check it with the Sitemap Validator, or build a sitemap with the Sitemap Generator. - Make sure pages are indexable first: no
noindex, a self-referencing canonical, and not blocked in robots.txt — the SEO Checker and Robots.txt Tester catch these. - Submission isn’t a guarantee of indexing — it only makes discovery fast. Quality and links still decide what ranks.
IndexNow on Webflow, WordPress and other platforms
WordPress has IndexNow plugins (including Microsoft’s own) and several SEO plugins with built-in support. On Cloudflare, “Crawler Hints” can send IndexNow signals automatically. Hosted builders such as Webflow don’t let you upload arbitrary files to the domain root; there, use Bing Webmaster Tools’ URL submission, or serve the key file through a proxy or worker on your domain if you have one.
Tools that pair well with the IndexNow Submitter
- Meta Tag Checker — See exactly how Google is likely to display your page: title and description measured in pixels, desktop and mobile previews, and every meta tag in the <head>.
- Heading Checker — Visualise the heading outline of any page.
- Image Alt Checker — Audit every image on a page in one table: alt text status, file size, width/height attributes, format and lazy loading — with filters and CSV export.
- Keyword Density Checker — Enter a URL and the keyword it should rank for.