How to Submit to IndexNow?

A recipe-style guide to telling search engines about your fresh content the moment you publish it — no waiting for crawlers to find you.

Ingredients

• A website you control — any domain where you can upload a text file
• A random API key — 8 to 128 hex characters
• A way to make HTTP requests — curl, Python, a CI pipeline, or your agent
• A list of URLs you want indexed

IndexNow is an open ping protocol co-developed by Microsoft and Yandex. Instead of waiting days or weeks for crawlers to rediscover your pages, you push a notification the moment content changes — and participating search engines pick it up within minutes. Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, and Yep all honour it. Google does not participate directly, but a single submission is broadcast to every IndexNow-enabled engine, so you cover a lot of ground with one call.

1 Generate a key

Your key is a random string between 8 and 128 characters long, using letters, digits, and dashes. Any UUID or hex blob works. Generate one with:

openssl rand -hex 16
# → 7a4f1e9b8c2d3f5a6b1c9d0e2f4a6b8c

Save this value somewhere safe — it is the secret that proves you own the domain. Anyone who knows your key can submit URLs on your behalf.

2 Host the key file

Create a plain-text file whose name is your key, with .txt on the end. The file’s contents must also be the key — nothing else. Place it at the root of your site so it is reachable at:

https://yourdomain.com/7a4f1e9b8c2d3f5a6b1c9d0e2f4a6b8c.txt

This is how search engines verify that whoever is submitting URLs actually controls the domain. You can also host the key file at a subpath if you prefer — just remember the full URL, because you will pass it as keyLocation in your requests.

3 Submit a single URL

The simplest submission is an HTTP GET to any IndexNow endpoint. Use this when you just published a single page and want it indexed now:

curl "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow\
?url=https://yourdomain.com/new-article\
&key=7a4f1e9b8c2d3f5a6b1c9d0e2f4a6b8c"

A 200 OK means the submission was accepted. You can swap api.indexnow.org for www.bing.com/indexnow or yandex.com/indexnow — it does not matter which endpoint you hit, because all of them share submissions with the other participating engines.

4 Submit a batch of URLs

For sitemaps, rebuilds, or bulk updates, send a POST with a JSON body. You can include up to 10,000 URLs in a single request:

curl -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow" \
     -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
     -d '{
  "host": "yourdomain.com",
  "key": "7a4f1e9b8c2d3f5a6b1c9d0e2f4a6b8c",
  "keyLocation": "https://yourdomain.com/7a4f1e9b8c2d3f5a6b1c9d0e2f4a6b8c.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://yourdomain.com/",
    "https://yourdomain.com/how-to-claw",
    "https://yourdomain.com/how-to-indexnow"
  ]
}'

Same idea, more URLs per call. Python version for a deploy script:

import requests

KEY = "7a4f1e9b8c2d3f5a6b1c9d0e2f4a6b8c"
HOST = "yourdomain.com"

payload = {
    "host": HOST,
    "key": KEY,
    "keyLocation": f"https://{HOST}/{KEY}.txt",
    "urlList": [
        f"https://{HOST}/",
        f"https://{HOST}/how-to-claw",
        f"https://{HOST}/how-to-indexnow",
    ],
}

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow",
    json=payload,
    headers={"Content-Type": "application/json; charset=utf-8"},
    timeout=10,
)
print(r.status_code, r.text)

5 Read the response codes

IndexNow returns a small set of status codes. Memorise them:

• 200 — accepted. You are done.
• 202 — accepted but key not yet verified. The engine will fetch your key file.
• 400 — bad request. Check your JSON shape and URL encoding.
• 403 — key invalid. The key file at keyLocation did not match.
• 422 — URLs don’t belong to host, or the key violates the format rules.
• 429 — rate limited. Back off and retry later.

6 Wire it into your deploy

The best time to submit is right after a successful deploy. For a static site, add a final step to your CI pipeline that posts the changed URLs. A GitHub Actions snippet that fits cleanly at the end of the deploy workflow:

- name: Notify IndexNow
  run: |
    curl -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow" \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
      -d '{
        "host": "yourdomain.com",
        "key": "${{ secrets.INDEXNOW_KEY }}",
        "keyLocation": "https://yourdomain.com/${{ secrets.INDEXNOW_KEY }}.txt",
        "urlList": [
          "https://yourdomain.com/",
          "https://yourdomain.com/how-to-claw"
        ]
      }'

Further reading

• Official IndexNow documentation
• Bing Webmaster Tools — IndexNow getting started
• List of participating search engines
• IndexNow FAQ