IndexNow: faster indexing in Bing and Yandex, and why Google is not in it

You fix a title, correct a canonical, publish a new page — and then wait. Days, sometimes weeks, before a search engine notices. IndexNow removes the waiting for some of them: you tell the engine the moment a URL changes, instead of hoping a crawler comes back soon.

What IndexNow actually is

It is a small open protocol. You POST a list of changed URLs to one endpoint, and the participating engines pick it up. Submit once and it reaches all of them — Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver share submissions between themselves.

Two things it is not, both worth saying plainly:

• Google does not participate. Google has said it is evaluating IndexNow and has not joined. If Google is your traffic, this changes nothing for you, and any article implying otherwise is selling something.
• It is not a ranking signal. It affects how fast a URL is looked at, not how well it does once it is. A bad page indexed quickly is still a bad page.

What is left is still useful: on Bing and Yandex, re-indexing that took weeks can take hours.

How ownership is proved

You could otherwise submit anyone's URLs, so the protocol requires proof. It is deliberately dumb: you host a text file at the root of the host you are submitting for, named after your key and containing that key and nothing else.

https://example.com/a1b2c3d4e5f6....txt
   → a1b2c3d4e5f6...

The engine fetches that file, sees your key, and accepts the submission. No account, no OAuth app, no waiting for approval.

Note the constraint, because it is the whole design: the file must sit on the host whose URLs you are submitting. Not a subdomain, not your CDN — that host. Which means no third party can place it for you, including us. You upload it once, and that is the only manual step.

Where the automation belongs

Submitting by hand every time you edit a page is not going to happen, and a tool that asks you to is not helping.

The right trigger is something that already knows a page changed. In Astrina that is the SEO crawler: it already visits every monitored page on a schedule, so it can hash what it fetched and compare. When the content moves, the URL goes to IndexNow. You do nothing.

Two details that decide whether this is useful or abusive:

• Fire on the change, not on the state. A page that changed yesterday has not changed today. Submitting it on every crawl is how you get rate-limited.
• Floor the frequency. Pages carry rotating tokens, timestamps and ad slots, so any content hash will occasionally jitter for no reason. A hard limit of one submission per URL per day means a jittery page costs you one ping a day — which is what a genuinely changing page would send anyway.

Setting it up

1. Generate a key in your site's integration settings.
2. Upload the key file to the root of your site. This is the step only you can do.
3. Press the check. It fetches the file over HTTPS and confirms it holds your key.

Do not skip the check, and be suspicious of any tool that skips it for you. Submitting without a valid key file returns 403 from the endpoint — silently, from your point of view. You would sit for weeks assuming pages were being submitted while every single request was refused.

That is also why the connection stays switched off in Astrina until the file has actually been fetched. A green tick that was never verified is worse than no tick: it tells you to stop looking.

Is it worth it

If your audience is on Bing or Yandex, yes — it is one file and then it is automatic forever. If you live entirely on Google, be honest with yourself: it costs you ten minutes and buys you nothing today, though it costs nothing to keep running if Google ever joins.

It sits under integrations alongside Search Console and the webmaster tools. The API reference covers pulling the same monitoring data into your own systems.