IndexRocketGuides · By Clioos 团队 · Updated October 26, 2026
How IndexNow works
Search engines traditionally find new pages by crawling: they revisit your site on their own schedule and discover what changed. IndexNow flips that around. When you publish or update a page, your site sends a short notification — a ping — to participating search engines, and they come and fetch the page. It is a push instead of a wait.
The basic flow
IndexNow was launched in October 2021 by Microsoft and Yandex. It works like this: you host a small key file on your site (at /.well-known/indexnow/<key>.txt) that proves you own the site. When a URL changes, you send one HTTP request to the IndexNow API with the host, the key, the key location, and the list of changed URLs. Participating engines receive the notification and crawl the listed URLs promptly.
Who participates
Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam all take part in IndexNow, and any engine can join the protocol. That covers a meaningful share of search traffic outside Google — and Bing's index also feeds other products, including ChatGPT's search.
What IndexNow does not do
Two limits matter. First, a notification is not a guarantee: the engine still decides whether to index the page after it crawls it. IndexNow speeds up discovery; it does not override the engine's quality judgement. Second, Google does not participate in IndexNow. Google has no equivalent push API for general pages, so for Google the honest path is still a sitemap in Search Console — which is exactly what IndexRocket does: push through IndexNow where it works, and give you a submission receipt for each push. If a push fails, the credit comes back automatically.
How IndexRocket uses it
When you submit URLs to IndexRocket, we group them by host and send one IndexNow notification per host, with our key file hosted at indexrocket.clioos.com. Each submission is recorded with its result — when it was pushed and what IndexNow answered — as a submission receipt. You can see the whole trail on your dashboard.
Questions
Is IndexNow the same as submitting a sitemap?
No. A sitemap is a list the engine reads when it next crawls you. IndexNow is a notification sent the moment a page changes, so the engine comes sooner. They complement each other — use both.
Does IndexNow work with Google?
No. Google does not participate in IndexNow and offers no bulk submission API for general pages. For Google, submit your sitemap in Search Console and check indexation there — IndexRocket does not claim to know whether a page is indexed.
Does an IndexNow ping guarantee indexing?
No. It guarantees the engine hears about the URL quickly. Whether the page is indexed is still the engine's decision after it crawls the page.
How many URLs can I send in one IndexNow request?
Up to 10,000 URLs per request, with a minimum of one. IndexRocket groups your submissions by host and sends them in batches.
More guides
- Why isn't my page indexed by Google?
- Sitemap basics: what it is and how to submit it
- How to check if your page is indexed