IndexNow

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website notify participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for the next crawl. The site proves ownership with a key file hosted on its own domain, and a notification sent to one participating engine is shared with the others.

Updated: 2026-10-16 · Glossary: Crawling and indexing

How it works

1. Generate a key and host it as a text file on your domain (for example /<key>.txt).
2. When a page changes, send its URL (or a batch of URLs) with the key to an IndexNow endpoint.
3. The engine checks the key file and may crawl the URL sooner.

The official IndexNow site lists support from Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep. Google is not among the listed participants, so Google still relies on sitemaps and its normal crawling.

What it does and does not do

• It speeds up discovery; it does not guarantee indexing or rankings.
• It matters most for sites that publish or update often, and for visibility in Bing, which also feeds some AI assistants.
• Many CMS plugins and hosts send IndexNow pings automatically. For WordPress, see IndexNow for WordPress.

Why it matters for small sites

A new site has low crawl demand, so a new article can wait days before a crawler visits. IndexNow is a free way to shorten that wait in the engines that support it. Combine it with a clean sitemap and correct noindex rules.

How Satelo uses it

satelo.io hosts its own IndexNow key and notifies participating engines when its pages are published or updated. Whether a partner article on a host site is pinged depends on the host's own setup (for example its SEO plugin), not on Satelo.

Related terms

• Crawl budget: Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine crawler can and wants to fetch from a site in a given period.
• noindex: noindex is a rule, set in a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, that tells search engines not to show a page in search results.
• llms.txt: llms.txt is a proposed standard for a Markdown file placed at the root of a website (/llms.txt) that gives large language models and AI agents a short, curated overview of the site: a title, a summary, and lists of the most useful links.

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