IndexNow explained: get Bing to recrawl your site in minutes

Traditional indexing is pull-based: the crawler decides when to revisit a page, using signals like your sitemap's last-modified date and historical change frequency. For a page that changes often, or a brand-new URL you want seen today, that lag is the enemy. IndexNow flips the model to push: you tell the engine the instant something changes.

How the protocol works

1. Generate a key — a hex string of 8 to 128 characters.
2. Host it in a UTF-8 text file whose name and contents both equal the key, at your site root.
3. POST a JSON body with your host, the key, the key location and a urlList of changed URLs.
4. The engine fetches your key file, confirms it matches, and accepts the batch.

curl -X POST https://www.bing.com/indexnow \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "host": "example.com",
    "key": "your-key",
    "keyLocation": "https://example.com/your-key.txt",
    "urlList": ["https://example.com/new-page"]
  }'

One endpoint, many engines

IndexNow is a shared network. Submitting to Bing's endpoint or to the neutral api.indexnow.org endpoint both propagate to every participating engine, so you never need to integrate each one separately. Pick the endpoint that matches your priority — for AI visibility, that is Bing, because Copilot reads Bing's index.

Limits and etiquette

• Up to 10,000 URLs per submission — batch, do not spam.
• Only submit URLs that genuinely changed; repeatedly pinging unchanged pages erodes trust.
• Every URL must be on the same host as the key file.
• Use it for adds, meaningful updates and deletions — not for every trivial edit.

What IndexNow will not do

IndexNow guarantees a fast fetch, not a fast index and definitely not a ranking boost. If a page is thin, blocked in robots.txt, or duplicative, submitting it faster just gets it evaluated — and rejected — faster. Treat IndexNow as the delivery mechanism and keep investing in the fundamentals that earn the citation.