What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website notify search engines about new, updated or deleted URLs with a single request, instead of waiting for a crawler to find them. It is supported by Bing, Seznam and Yandex, among others, and a submission sent to one participating engine is shared with the rest. Domain ownership is verified with a key file published on the same domain; Google does not support IndexNow.
How we use it at Koda Plus
On koda.plus, after every deployment with new or changed pages, we run a script that collects the URLs from the sitemap and submits them to api.indexnow.org. It fetches the sitemap bypassing the Cloudflare cache, because right after a deployment the edge can still serve the previous version. URLs of retired pages that now redirect with a 301 and are no longer in the sitemap are passed to the script directly. Google does not support the protocol, so these submissions make no difference there.
When it makes sense
- You publish or update pages frequently
- Traffic from Bing and services built on its index matters to you
- You are retiring pages and want search engines to pick up redirects sooner
- Your deployments are automated, so submission is easy to add