Add IndexNow to your publish pipeline
Notify Bing, Yandex and other consortium engines the instant a page goes live — bypass crawl-budget delays for time-sensitive content (election PR, breaking news, product launches).
Add IndexNow to your publish pipeline
Tools
- · A reachable HTTP server
- · A UUID-like 8-128 char key
Prerequisites
- · Ability to host a static text file on your site root
- · A publish hook in your CMS
Step-by-step
Generate and host the key file
Create a random 8-128 char alphanumeric key. Host it at /indexnow-key.txt with the key as the only content. The filename must match the key.
POST the changed URL on every publish
POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow with body { host, key, keyLocation, urlList }. Send the list of URLs that just published, updated or were deleted.
Confirm acceptance
HTTP 200 = accepted. 422 = key/keyLocation mismatch. 429 = rate limited (slow down). 400 = malformed payload.
In the glossary
Terms used.
IndexNow
IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a site instantly notify participating search engines, including Bing, Yandex and Seznam, when a URL is published, updated or deleted, bypassing crawl-budget delays. Google does not participate, but the major Bing-backed engines do, so publishers send the affected URLs on every publish action.
Open
robots.txt
robots.txt is a plain-text file at /robots.txt that tells crawlers which paths they are allowed to fetch. It can explicitly allow named crawlers, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and Bingbot, and disallow private paths like /manage. Allowing AI crawlers is a deliberate choice so pages can be cited in AI answers.
Open
FAQ
Frequently asked.
- How long does Add IndexNow to… typically take?
- Roughly 30m for the steps in this playbook end-to-end, assuming the prerequisites are already in place.
- What do I need before I start?
- Ability to host a static text file on your site root; A publish hook in your CMS
- Can Public Pulse run this for me?
- Yes. This playbook is open documentation but we do this work for clients. Free 30-minute consultation to scope.