What IndexNow actually does
IndexNow sends one message to participating search engines: this URL has been added, updated or deleted. That is the whole protocol. The official description on indexnow.org calls it “a simple ping”, and says that without it “it can take days to weeks for search engines to discover that the content has changed”.
Nothing else travels with the ping. It does not carry your page content, anything about your visitors, or any claim about quality. Three things it is explicitly not, all of them stated by the people who run it:
- Not a ranking signal. The protocol has no field in which quality could be expressed. Speed of discovery and position in results are different problems.
- Not a guarantee of indexing. Bing's own getting-started page says submitting URLs “does not guarantee that web pages will be crawled or indexed”. The indexnow.org FAQ repeats it: the engine still applies its crawl quota, scheduling and quality checks.
- Not a replacement for your sitemap. IndexNow covers what changed since you switched it on. Your sitemap is the full inventory, including everything that changed before. The FAQ is clear that you should run both, and that you should not retroactively submit old pages.
The honest summary. IndexNow removes waiting. If your new end-of-tenancy cleaning page would have sat unseen by Bing for three weeks, it now gets looked at within hours. If that page is weak, it will be a weak page that Bing found quickly.
Which search engines use IndexNow, and does Google?
Six take part as of 15 September 2026: Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yep and Amazon. Google does not. The indexnow.org home page names Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep as supporters, and the FAQ lists a submission endpoint for Amazon as well, alongside the shared endpoint at api.indexnow.org.
You only ever submit to one of them. Search engines adopting the protocol agree that submitted URLs are automatically shared with every other participant, so a single request reaches the lot.
On Google: its own documentation on asking Google to recrawl lists exactly two methods, the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and an XML sitemap, and does not mention IndexNow anywhere. Treat anyone selling “instant Google indexing” through IndexNow with suspicion. For Google the honest answer is an accurate sitemap plus Search Console, and Google warns there too that requesting a crawl guarantees nothing.
Why a UK local business should care in 2026
Bing took 5.67% of UK searches in August 2026 according to StatCounter, against Google's 91.75%. That is the honest number, and on its own it would not be worth ten minutes of anyone's afternoon. What makes it worth the ten minutes is where else Bing's results end up.
| Engine | UK share, Aug 2026 | Reached by IndexNow? |
|---|---|---|
| 91.75% | No — not a participant | |
| Bing | 5.67% | Yes |
| Yahoo! | 1.25% | Indirectly — Bing-fed results |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.71% | Indirectly — states it sources links largely from Bing |
| Ecosia | 0.30% | Not a participant in its own right |
| Yandex | 0.28% | Yes |
Add to that Microsoft Copilot, which is grounded in Bing web results. Copilot is built into Windows and Edge, so for a large number of people it is the assistant that happens to be there. When someone asks it for a roofer in Basingstoke or a wedding venue near Winchester, it answers from what Bing has in its index. A page Bing has not seen cannot be part of that answer.
Be clear-eyed about scale. On a typical local service website this is single-digit percentages of search visits plus an unmeasurable slice of AI answers. The reason to do it is that it is a one-off ten-minute job that then runs by itself, not because it will transform your enquiries.
Correction to an earlier version of this guide. This page previously implied that Bing's index feeds ChatGPT. That is no longer accurate. OpenAI runs its own crawler for ChatGPT search, OAI-SearchBot, and is not an IndexNow participant, so IndexNow does not reach ChatGPT. Getting seen there is a separate job.
Before you start: what you need
Two things. You need Bing Webmaster Tools set up and verified for your site — not because IndexNow requires it, but because without it you have no way of checking whether any of this worked. And you need to know how your website was built, because that decides which of the routes below is yours. You do not need to be technical, and IndexNow itself is free, published under a Creative Commons licence.
Which route applies to your website
Six routes cover almost every UK small business site. Find yours, then read that section.
| Your site is on | Route | Effort | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare (any platform behind it) | Turn on Crawler Hints | One toggle | Free, all plans |
| WordPress | A plugin | Install and activate | Free options exist |
| Wix | Already done, on a paid plan | Nothing | Included |
| Shopify, GoDaddy, Duda, Joomla, Drupal | Native or an extension | Check platform settings | Usually free |
| Squarespace | Not possible — submit by hand instead | A minute per page | Free |
| Hand-built or static site | Key file plus a request | Developer-sized, once | Free |
Cloudflare: the one-click route
If your site sits behind Cloudflare, this is one toggle on every plan including the free one, and it is the least work of any route here. In the Cloudflare dashboard open Caching then Configuration, and switch on Crawler Hints.
Cloudflare then watches its own cache for signs that a page has changed and notifies IndexNow on your behalf. You never generate a key or touch a file. Responses with a status code of 4xx or above are left out of what it reports.
It is a whole-zone setting, not per-page, so a page you want kept out of search is handled the normal way, with a noindex robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header. Plenty of UK small business sites are behind Cloudflare without their owner knowing, because the developer put them there, so it is worth a look before you install anything else.
WordPress: which plugin, and which ones charge
Check what you already have before installing anything — three of the four big SEO plugins include IndexNow, but two of them only on a paid plan. Checked 15 September 2026:
| Plugin | IndexNow included? | Where to switch it on |
|---|---|---|
| IndexNow Plugin (by the Bing Webmaster team) | Yes, free. 100,000+ active installs | Plugins, Add New, search IndexNow. Generates and hosts the key itself |
| Rank Math | Yes, in the free version | Rank Math SEO, enable the Instant Indexing module, then Instant Indexing, Settings |
| Yoast SEO | Premium only — $118.80 a year ex VAT for one site | Yoast SEO, Settings, Site features, Technical SEO, IndexNow |
| All in One SEO | Paid plans only — Basic from $49.50 the first year, $99 on renewal | All in One SEO, Feature Manager, activate the IndexNow addon |
If you already pay for Yoast Premium or AIOSEO, use the feature you have paid for. If you do not, install the Bing Webmaster team's own free IndexNow plugin and leave it at that. It respects noindex, generates and hosts the key file for you, and needs no account anywhere. Rank Math's free version is the other genuinely free answer, and it submits to Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver.
There is a second Microsoft plugin, Bing URL Submissions, with 40,000+ active installs. It uses the older Bing-only URL Submission API and needs an API key from Bing Webmaster Tools. Unless you want Bing alone, the IndexNow plugin is the better choice, because one submission reaches every participating engine.
Do not install two. Running the IndexNow plugin alongside Rank Math's Instant Indexing module means every publish gets submitted twice. Nothing breaks, but repeated submission of the same URL is the behaviour the protocol asks you to avoid, and it is a fast way to collect an HTTP 429.
Wix, Squarespace and the other hosted builders
Wix does it for you, but only on a paid plan. Wix's own help page says it checks for changes to your site pages and submits them to IndexNow on your behalf, with no setup required, and that IndexNow with Wix is available only for sites on a Premium plan. An earlier version of this guide said Wix did this for all sites; that was wrong, and if your Wix site is still on the free plan you are not getting it.
Squarespace cannot do it. It is not among the platforms listed as supporting IndexNow on indexnow.org, and it gives you no way to put a file at the root of your domain. The workaround people suggest — uploading the key through the editor — does not work, because uploaded files land in a subfolder and the protocol says a key file in a subfolder can only authorise URLs inside that same subfolder. Use URL Submission in Bing Webmaster Tools by hand instead: paste in the address of the page you have just changed. For a site that changes a few times a month, that is enough.
Shopify, GoDaddy, Duda, Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop, Umbraco and several others are listed by indexnow.org as offering native support or support through an extension. Search your platform's help for “IndexNow” before assuming you need to build anything.
The manual route: a key file on a static site
Three steps, and the whole thing rests on one text file whose name is your key. This is the route for a hand-built, static or custom site, and it is the one this website uses.
1. Make a key
Your key must be 8 to 128 characters long and can contain only lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers and hyphens. A UUID with the hyphens left in is the usual choice. Nothing generates it for you on this route; you invent it.
2. Put the key file at your root
Save a UTF-8 text file named yourkey.txt, containing your key and nothing else, at the root of your site, so that it loads at https://yourdomain.co.uk/yourkey.txt with no login. Open it in a browser to check. The documentation says plainly that it is strongly recommended you use the root rather than a subfolder, for the reason given in the Squarespace section above.
3. Send the ping when something changes
For a single page, one request does it:
https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=<your URL-encoded page address>&key=<your key>
For several pages at once, POST a JSON body containing host, key, an optional keyLocation and a urlList, up to 10,000 URLs per request. Whoever built your site can wire that into whatever publishes your pages in well under an hour, and it is a reasonable thing to ask a developer for.
Page addresses must be URL-encoded to the RFC-3986 standard, so a colon becomes %3A and a slash %2F. Getting that wrong is the most common cause of a rejected submission.
What the API actually returns
A working submission returns HTTP 200, and your very first one may return 202 instead while the key is checked. This site runs IndexNow as a daily job, so these are the codes we see rather than a list copied from a specification:
| Code | Means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | URL received | Nothing. Received is not the same as indexed |
| 202 | Received, key validation pending | Normal on a first submission. Check the key file loads |
| 400 | Bad request — malformed | Check the URL encoding and that the key parameter is spelled right |
| 403 | Key not valid | The file is missing, or the key inside it does not match |
| 422 | URL does not belong to the host, or key does not match the schema | Check you are submitting your own domain, in the same form as the key file |
| 429 | Too many requests | Stop, read the Retry-After header, submit less often |
The one that catches people out is 200. It confirms receipt only. Nothing about a 200 says the page will be crawled, and nothing says it will be indexed.
How to check IndexNow is working
Two checks, and both take under a minute. First, open https://yourdomain.co.uk/yourkey.txt in a browser. If it shows your key as plain text, with no login screen and no 404, search engines can verify you. If you used a plugin or Cloudflare, the key file still exists — the plugin's settings screen will tell you where.
Second, publish a real change to a real page, then open Bing Webmaster Tools, select your site and go to URL Submission in the left-hand menu. That is where submissions for your site are listed. Most sites are allowed up to 10,000 manual URL submissions a day there, which no local business will ever approach.
If nothing appears, work through this in order:
- Is the site verified in Bing Webmaster Tools at all? Reporting only exists for verified sites.
- Did you publish something after switching it on? An unchanged site produces nothing to report, and the protocol asks you not to submit pages that changed before you set it up.
- Is the key file reachable? A firewall, a staging password or a redirect to www can all hide it.
- Does the domain match? If your key file is on
yourdomain.co.ukand you submitwww.yourdomain.co.uk, expect a 422. Subdomains count as separate hosts and each needs its own key file.
Mistakes that stop IndexNow working
Most failures come down to four things, and all four are in the official troubleshooting list.
- The key file is in the wrong place or named wrongly. The filename must be exactly your key followed by
.txt, and the contents must be exactly the key. - Submitting pages that have not changed. Submit on publish, on meaningful edit, and on deletion — not on a schedule for the whole site.
- Submitting the same URL repeatedly. Wait at least five minutes between submissions of the same page, and at least ten after a 429.
- Submitting before the key file is public. Upload the file first, confirm it loads, then send anything.
One more that is not an error: submitting deleted and redirected pages is encouraged. If you retire a service page and it now returns a 404 or 410, or redirects, tell IndexNow. That is how the old page leaves the index faster.
What IndexNow will not fix
It will not fix a page that has nothing to say. The indexnow.org troubleshooting notes list the reasons a submitted URL still does not get indexed: crawl quota, thin or duplicate content, robots.txt blocks, noindex tags, and the search engine simply deciding not to. Only the first is about speed.
So if your enquiries are flat, IndexNow is not the lever. The order that actually works is: have pages worth finding, make sure they can be found at all, then shorten the wait. If your site still describes what you do in vague terms, start with writing a service page that gets found, and come back to this once there is something new to announce.
Common questions
- What is IndexNow, in one sentence?
- IndexNow is a free open protocol that lets you tell participating search engines the moment a page on your site is added, changed or deleted, instead of waiting for their crawler to come round and notice. In its own words on indexnow.org it is "a simple ping". It carries one piece of information: this URL changed. Nothing about your visitors, your customers or your business data is sent.
- Does Google use IndexNow?
- No. Google is not a participating search engine, and its own documentation on asking Google to recrawl lists only two methods, the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and an XML sitemap. IndexNow is not mentioned anywhere in it. For Google, keep your sitemap accurate and use Search Console. The two systems sit side by side and do not replace each other.
- Is IndexNow worth it for a small website?
- Yes, if switching it on takes ten minutes and costs nothing, which on most platforms it does. The indexnow.org FAQ says outright that it is beneficial even for sites with only a few pages. A small site is crawled less often than a big one, so the gap between publishing and being seen is longer, and that gap is exactly what IndexNow closes. It is not worth paying for an SEO plugin licence to get it.
- Will IndexNow improve my rankings?
- No. IndexNow changes how quickly a search engine learns your page changed, not how well that page does once it is seen. Nothing in the protocol carries a quality signal. Bing states plainly that submitting a URL does not guarantee it will be crawled or indexed at all. If a page is thin, duplicated, blocked by robots.txt or marked noindex, telling Bing about it faster changes nothing.
- How do I know IndexNow is working?
- Two checks. First, open your key file in a browser at yourdomain.co.uk/yourkey.txt and confirm it shows the key as plain text with no login. Second, publish a real change and look at URL Submission in Bing Webmaster Tools, which lists what Bing has received for your site. A plugin or Cloudflare handles both for you, but the key file check still works.
- Can I use IndexNow on Squarespace?
- Not properly. Squarespace is not on the list of platforms with IndexNow support on indexnow.org, and it gives you no way to place a file at the root of your domain. Uploaded files land under a subfolder, and the protocol only lets a key file in a subfolder authorise URLs inside that same subfolder, so it cannot cover your ordinary pages. Use URL Submission in Bing Webmaster Tools by hand instead.
- Does IndexNow tell ChatGPT about my pages?
- No. OpenAI is not an IndexNow participant. ChatGPT search is fed by OpenAI's own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, which finds pages the ordinary way. What IndexNow does reach is Microsoft Copilot, which is grounded in Bing, and the engines that use Bing results such as DuckDuckGo and Yahoo. Being visible in ChatGPT is a separate job.
- How many URLs can I submit to IndexNow?
- Up to 10,000 URLs in a single POST request, according to the IndexNow documentation. There is no published daily ceiling because each search engine sets its own, and you are told you have hit it by an HTTP 429 response. Bing Webmaster Tools separately allows most sites up to 10,000 manual URL submissions a day. A local business site will never get near any of these.
Related guides
Every detail checked against primary documentation on 15 September 2026. Protocol behaviour, key rules, the 10,000-URL POST limit, response codes, the keyLocation subfolder rule, participating engines and endpoints, and the troubleshooting list: indexnow.org documentation and FAQ. Platform support and the “does not guarantee” wording: Bing's IndexNow getting-started page. Crawler Hints behaviour, dashboard location and plan availability: Cloudflare Cache documentation. Wix behaviour and the Premium-plan condition: Wix's own help article. Plugin availability, install counts and settings paths: the WordPress.org listings for the IndexNow Plugin and Bing URL Submissions Plugin, Rank Math's Instant Indexing documentation, Yoast's Site features documentation, All in One SEO's IndexNow documentation; prices from Yoast's and All in One SEO's own pricing pages, in US dollars as listed. Google's position: Google Search Central documentation on asking Google to recrawl. OpenAI crawler behaviour: OpenAI's bots documentation. DuckDuckGo result sources: DuckDuckGo's help pages. UK search shares for August 2026: StatCounter Global Stats. The 10,000-a-day Bing Webmaster Tools manual submission allowance comes from a third-party 2026 guide, because Bing's own URL Submission help page requires JavaScript and could not be read directly — treat it as indicative. IndexNow publishes no fixed rate limit and none could be established.