What is IndexNow and How Does it Help With SEO in 2025?

Danielle Jackson
Apr 24
22 min read

IndexNow is a search indexing protocol that enables websites to instantly notify participating search engines of content changes. Instead of waiting for search engine bots to discover updates on their own, IndexNow lets site owners actively push new or updated URLs to certain search engines with a simple API call.

This guide explains how IndexNow works, how it compares to traditional indexing methods, its impact on SEO in 2025, and how enterprise-level e-commerce sites can implement it to gain a competitive edge in search.

Why does this matter? In just a couple of years, IndexNow has gained significant traction among some search engines (Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, etc., though Google does not support it currently). By late 2023, over 60 million websites were using IndexNow to publish 1.4 billion URLs per day, and about 12% of new URLs clicked in web search results were being discovered through IndexNow. In early 2024, Microsoft reported that IndexNow usage had grown to account for 17% of new URL discoveries on Bing. Clearly, this protocol is shaping how content gets indexed and found.

What is IndexNow?

IndexNow is an open-source indexing protocol initiated by major search engines, originally by Microsoft Bing and Yandex in late 2021, to provide a standardized way for websites to notify search engines about content changes. In simple terms, it works like an instant alert system for search engines:

Whenever you add, update, or delete a page on your site, IndexNow lets you send a quick notification (a “ping”) to search engines.
This ping tells the search engines which URL changed and that they should crawl it. The search engine can then quickly fetch that page and update its index accordingly.

Addressing indexing issues is crucial for making sure that that your content is visible and can be effectively crawled by search engines.

Traditional search engine indexing relies on bots periodically crawling your site, which is considered the “pull” model. In contrast, IndexNow is a “push” indexing model. Instead of passively waiting for crawlers, your site actively pushes updates to the search engine. This fundamental difference means faster awareness of changes.

Another powerful aspect of IndexNow is that the participating search engines share submitted URLs with each other. You only need to notify one IndexNow endpoint, and that URL will be automatically distributed to all other search engines that support IndexNow.

If you send a ping to Bing, Bing will then forward that URL to Yandex, Naver, Seznam, and any other IndexNow partners. This collaboration is designed to simplify indexing efforts across the web.

How Does IndexNow Work? A Technical SEO Overview

From a technical standpoint, IndexNow is very straightforward. Here’s an overview of how it works and what is needed to use it:

API Endpoint & Key

Websites generate a unique IndexNow API key and host it in a text file at the root of their domain (e.g. https://yourdomain.com/your-key.txt). This key proves ownership of the site to the search engines. The IndexNow protocol provides an online key generator tool for convenience, or you can create a GUID/string yourself. Once you have your key, you publish it in a .txt file named exactly as the key value on your site’s root so search engines can retrieve it for verification.

URL Submission (Ping)

When a page is added, updated, or deleted, your system will send an HTTP request to an IndexNow API URL with the page URL and your key as parameters. This request can be a simple GET call. For example:

https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://yourdomain.com/updated-page&key=YOURKEY

This single request notifies all IndexNow-enabled search engines at once. Under the hood, api.indexnow.org distributes the URL to Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, etc., so you don’t have to ping each one individually. The search engines receive the notification and queue the URL for crawling.

Crawling & Indexing

Upon receiving the ping, search engines will check the URL and crawl it and fetch the content if it’s deemed crawl-worthy. IndexNow doesn’t force immediate indexing of every URL; the search engine still applies its own logic, crawl scheduling, and crawl budget considerations. Essentially, IndexNow tells the engine “this page changed, please crawl it soon.” The engine then prioritizes those URLs for crawling versus others it might crawl later.

If the content meets the engine’s criteria (not blocked by robots.txt, content quality, etc.), it will get indexed, often much faster than it would through normal discovery. Implementing server side rendering can further enhance the efficiency of IndexNow by improving page load times and making dynamic content more easily discoverable by search engines.

Batch Support

IndexNow allows submitting either one URL at a time or a batch, submitting multiple URLs in one API call. You can send a JSON payload via HTTP POST with a list of URLs, or make quick successive GET requests. Bing’s team has suggested it’s best to notify as soon as changes happen rather than waiting to batch up too many URLs in order to maximize freshness. In general, send updates in near-real-time if possible instead of large infrequent batches.

Rate Limiting and Frequency

There are some guidelines on submission frequency. You should only submit URLs that have changed. Don’t re-submit the same URL repeatedly if it hasn’t changed. If a page updates very frequently (e.g. stock price or weather page updating every minute), it’s not efficient to ping on every tiny change. Waiting a short interval, like aggregating changes every few minutes is advised.

Avoid submitting huge numbers of URLs in a short time beyond what’s reasonable; if you do, you may get an HTTP 429 “Too Many Requests” response. Search engines allocate a crawl quota to each site, and IndexNow submissions still count against that quota, so you can’t exceed the engine’s limits by spamming the API. The good news is that by using IndexNow, you’re signaling which URLs need crawling, so search engines will prioritize those within your quota over other pages that haven’t changed.

Verification

The first time you use a new key, search engines will attempt to download the key file from your site (your-key.txt) to verify you own the domain. After that, they typically won’t check the key file on every submission, only occasionally or if you change the key. Make sure that the key file remains accessible. If you manage multiple websites or subdomains, you can either use the same key on all and host copies of the key file on each host, or generate separate keys for each, both approaches are supported.

In practice, setting up IndexNow is a one-time configuration to generate/host the key, and then an automated trigger in your CMS or platform to ping the API whenever content changes. The protocol itself is lightweight, just a quick HTTP request that takes only milliseconds. This makes it well-suited for enterprise websites that might update thousands of pages daily, as it efficiently keeps search engines in the loop about every significant change.

IndexNow vs. Traditional Indexing Methods

How does IndexNow compare to the older ways of getting content indexed? It’s important to understand the differences to see where IndexNow fits into your overall SEO strategy.

XML Sitemaps (Pull Indexing)

Sitemaps are a staple of SEO. It is an XML file listing of all the URLs on your site and their last modified dates that search engines can fetch periodically. Sitemaps are an example of the “pull” model, where you provide a roadmap and search engines decide when to crawl it. IndexNow is not a replacement for sitemaps. The official IndexNow guidance is to use sitemaps for the full list of URLs but use IndexNow to immediately notify of recent changes. Think of sitemaps as the safety net (the engine will eventually find everything there) and IndexNow as the real-time alert for critical updates.

Search Engine Webmaster Tools & Manual Submission

Traditionally, site owners could manually submit URLs for indexing. Google Search Console’s “Request Indexing” feature is one example. You paste in a URL and ask Google to re-crawl it. Bing Webmaster Tools (WMT) similarly had a URL submission tool/API that included quotas. These methods can speed things up but have significant limitations.

Google’s manual submission is rate-limited to only allow a few URLs at a time and not feasible for large-scale or continuous updates. It’s meant for debugging or very important single pages. Using IndexNow provides a significant advantage over manual submissions by automating the process and assists in the timely indexing of content. IndexNow automates this process for every change, at scale, without someone manually intervening. It’s like having an indexing hotline that’s always on.

Google Doesn't Participate

As stated before, Google is not a participant in IndexNow as of 2025, so you cannot rely on IndexNow to get Google to index your content. Google has stated it continues to rely on its own crawling efficiencies and hasn’t integrated IndexNow, though it did test the protocol in the past.

Google’s stance has been that their crawler is very efficient at finding new content on popular sites, but this doesn’t always comfort SEO teams when new pages languish unindexed. Therefore, for Google, you must still use sitemaps, RSS feeds, and possibly their limited Indexing API for certain content types. For Bing, Yandex, and other IndexNow engines, IndexNow can replace most manual submissions.

Ad-hoc Ping & Feed protocols

In the past, there were other “push” mechanisms like RSS/Atom feed updates or Ping services, like the older XML-RPC ping that blog platforms used to notify blog search engines of new posts. Even WordPress’s Yoast SEO plugin automatically pings Google and Bing when you publish new content, essentially telling them your sitemap is updated. Those are helpful but limited. IndexNow is more direct in that it tells exactly which URL changed, and it does so in a unified way for multiple search engines. It’s a more robust evolution of the concept of pushing updates.

General Web Crawling

Of course, even if you did nothing, search engine bots would eventually find new content by crawling links from your site or elsewhere. The downside is speed and coverage. Bots may take days or weeks to revisit a page and notice changes, especially on large enterprise sites where not every page gets crawled daily. IndexNow makes crawling more efficient by focusing the bots’ attention on what’s new or updated, rather than repeatedly crawling static pages. This can drastically cut down the discovery time.

Instead of waiting days for a crawler to stumble on your new product page, IndexNow can inform search engines within minutes of launch. This benefit is even more pronounced for large websites with millions of URLs, where crawl budget is a concern. IndexNow helps makes sure that the limited crawl hits are spent on updated content rather than unchanged pages.

The comparison between IndexNow and traditional methods comes down to speed and proactivity. Sitemaps and regular crawling are slower and passive; IndexNow is immediate and active. For enterprise SEO, the best approach in 2025 is to use both: keep your XML sitemaps up to date for Google and as a backup, and layer IndexNow on top for instant indexing on engines that support it. This way, you cover all bases for maximum reach and maximum speed.

SEO Impact of IndexNow in 2025

Implementing IndexNow can have several positive impacts on your SEO effectiveness, especially for enterprise and e-commerce sites where timing and crawl efficiency matter. Below we discuss these benefits and their impact on SEO in 2025.

Indexing Speed & Freshness

The most obvious benefit of IndexNow is significantly faster indexing of new or updated content. By pushing URLs directly to search engines, websites can reduce the typical lag time between publishing and indexing from days down to potentially minutes. Updating content regularly ensures that your site remains relevant and maintains its position in search results. For IndexNow participating search engines, this speed advantage means:

Fresh content appears in search results for participating engines sooner: If you publish a time-sensitive blog post or update product details (price, availability, etc.), those changes become searchable much faster on engines like Bing. Instead of waiting a week for Bing’s bot to crawl a new product page, that page might be indexed the same day and start ranking for relevant queries, capturing traffic that would otherwise be lost in the interim.
Competitive Edge in SERP visibility: In fast-moving niches like seasonal products, news, and trending topics, being the first site indexed can mean being the first shown to users. Enterprises that adopt IndexNow are ahead of the curse, as they’re not lagging behind competitors who might already be pushing their content updates. As of 2024, 17% of new URLs that people click on in Bing’s search results were discovered via IndexNow. If your site isn’t part of that pipeline, you may be missing out on search discoverability.
More control over what gets indexed: IndexNow gives some power back to webmasters to indicate “index this now, it’s important.” While it doesn’t guarantee indexing, it strongly signals to the engine to prioritize those pages. This is especially useful for large e-commerce sites where you might want to immediately index new product pages or remove discontinued products from the index to avoid customer frustration. In essence, you can better synchronize what’s live on your site with what’s shown in search results.

It’s important to note that faster indexing does not equal higher ranking by itself. You still need quality, relevant content and good SEO on-page. IndexNow simply makes sure that those optimizations see the light of day faster, which provides the opportunity for the content to be ranked more quickly. Think of IndexNow as shortening the feedback loop for your SEO changes: if you improve a page’s SEO or publish something new, you’ll see the impact sooner because the page gets indexed sooner. It’s also important to note that these benefits only apply to the IndexNow participating engines, and making sure your SEO strategy supports indexation for Google is imperative.

Crawl Budget & Efficiency

For large enterprise-scale websites, crawl budget is a crucial concept. Search engines allocate a certain amount of crawling to your site per unit time. Wasting crawl budget on unchanged pages is inefficient and it can take several days to weeks for search engines to crawl newly updated pages. IndexNow helps optimize crawl budget usage in a few ways:

Priority on Important URLs: IndexNow participating search engines generally will prioritize crawling URLs that have been pinged via IndexNow over the myriad of other URLs they could crawl on your site. This means your allocated crawl budget is spent more wisely on pages that you know need recrawling. Effective internal linking can enhance the authority of key pages by distributing link juice, thereby improving their rankings. Pages that haven’t changed can be crawled less often. This triaging can improve the freshness of your indexed content without increasing the overall crawl load.
Reduced Redundant Crawls: Without IndexNow, crawlers have to periodically check pages to see if they changed. This leads to many fetches of pages that are actually unchanged, which is a waste of bandwidth and server resources. IndexNow cuts down unnecessary crawling by directly telling the bot not to bother with page X until you ping it. This can lower the strain on your server from bot traffic. By implementing IndexNow, some sites, especially those using services like Cloudflare’s Crawler Hints, have seen overall crawl activity become more targeted and potentially reduced in volume.
- This efficiency aspect has a side benefit of saving energy. As one report highlighted, traditional crawling “uses a lot of energy” whereas a targeted approach like IndexNow “reduces energy consumption” in the indexing process. For companies with sustainability goals, this tech-friendly optimization is a positive.
Fewer Missed Updates: A big challenge is when important changes slip through the cracks because bots didn’t crawl in time. If you update a page’s critical information like a recall notice or a legal update and Google/Bing don’t crawl it for days, users may see outdated info in search snippets. By pinging via IndexNow, you make sure that the update is noticed and crawled according to your urgency. This leads to better alignment between your live site and what search engines reflect. It also means you can confidently remove content helping prevent obsolete pages from lingering in search results.
Crawl Budget Reallocation: In theory, if a search engine knows you’ll tell them about changes, it might crawl your site broadly a bit less often and instead rely on IndexNow pings. This could free up some of your crawl budget to be used on other sites or other sections of your site. Bing hasn’t publicly said they will crawl non-IndexNow sites less due to IndexNow, but logically as adoption grows, engines can balance their crawling based on signals received. For your site, this means less bot traffic hammering pages that never change like old blog posts or stable content, and more focus on new content. Your SEO team might notice more even crawl distribution and quicker spike in crawl activity right after major updates instead of random crawl patterns.

In summary, IndexNow makes crawling smarter: crawl what’s changed now, and don’t crawl what hasn’t. This efficient approach benefits search engines, as they waste fewer resources. It also benefits site owners because their important pages get attention sooner, and servers deal with less unnecessary load. It’s a win-win for SEO effectiveness: important content is always fresh in the index, which ultimately can lead to better user experience and potentially better rankings since outdated content or broken pages won’t linger unaddressed.

Implementing IndexNow on Enterprise Websites

Adopting IndexNow in an enterprise or large e-commerce environment requires coordination between the marketing/SEO team and the development/IT team. Making sure that your mobile site is optimized for IndexNow can significantly enhance your SEO efforts, as search engines prioritize mobile-friendly content. Below are recommended steps and tools for rolling out IndexNow at scale.

Setup Steps

Implementing IndexNow can be broken down into a few fundamental steps:

Generate an IndexNow Key: Obtain a unique key for your site. You can use the official online key generation tool provided by Bing, or generate a GUID/UUID string yourself. The key is typically an alphanumeric string (e.g., 2040dfa39465188f6ee8c3d07c052…). This key will be used to verify your site’s identity to the search engines.
Host the Key Verification File: Create a plaintext file named YOURKEY.txt, with YOURKEY being the exact key string, and upload it to the root of your website (e.g., https://www.example.com/your-key.txt). The file’s contents should be just the key itself. For a multi-site enterprise with many subdomains or country sites, you need the file on each host/domain that will use IndexNow. You can use the same key for multiple sites if that’s easier, as long as each site has the corresponding file. Once this is in place, you’ve proven ownership and search engines will check this file the first time you ping them.
Integrate URL Submission in Your Workflow: This is the critical automation piece. You need to configure your website or CMS to trigger the IndexNow API call whenever content is added, updated, or removed. Leveraging AI tools can automate the IndexNow submission process. Depending on your platform, this could be done in various ways:
1. Using a CMS Plugin or Built-in Feature: Check if your CMS or site platform already supports IndexNow. For example, Yoast SEO Premium has built-in support for IndexNow, automatically pinging IndexNow when you publish or update content. Microsoft Bing released an official IndexNow plugin for WordPress as well, and other SEO plugins like RankMath and AIOSEO added IndexNow support early on. If you use these, configuration might be as simple as toggling it on and entering your key.
2. Via a CDN or Cloud Platform: Some enterprises rely on CDNs or cloud services that can handle IndexNow pings. Cloudflare introduced a feature called Crawler Hints that integrates with IndexNow. If your site is on Cloudflare, you can enable Crawler Hints and it will automatically send IndexNow notifications to search engines when it detects content changes on your site (e.g., when cache is purged). This is a one-switch setup in Cloudflare’s dashboard. Other services might offer similar capabilities.
3. Custom Implementation (API calls): If you have a custom website or enterprise CMS, your developers can add a hook in the publishing workflow. When a page is published or updated in the CMS, have the system make an HTTP GET request to the IndexNow API URL (as shown earlier) for that page’s URL. This can often be done with a simple script or a small piece of code. Microsoft’s documentation even provides code samples in multiple languages. You can submit one URL at a time, or buffer a few and submit together, but as mentioned, it’s usually best to send immediately per URL to maximize speed. if you get a 429 response, implement a retry with backoff.
Monitor and Verify: After implementation, it’s important to verify that it’s working correctly. Check your server logs or monitoring tool to see the IndexNow API requests going out when content changes. Additionally, you can use Bing Webmaster Tools (WMT), which includes an IndexNow Insights report that shows you statistics on URLs you’ve submitted, their indexation status, and any errors. This can be invaluable for QA, as you can confirm search engines are receiving and acting on your pings. The report also breaks down the source of submissions (e.g., showing whether URLs came via your CMS plugin, via Cloudflare, or manual submission). If you see URLs not getting indexed, the insights can hint if there was a problem like content quality issues or a misconfigured key.
Scale Up and Maintain: Once the basics work, scale it to cover all parts of your site. If you have multiple content sections or microservices, ensure they all hook into the IndexNow submission process. Also, train your content/SEO team to understand that when they publish content, it will be live on search engines quickly, so all approvals should be final. Maintenance is minimal. You might rotate the key if needed or update the integration if you change platforms. Otherwise, it runs in the background.

Tools and Platforms Supporting IndexNow

One of the advantages of IndexNow’s rapid adoption is that many SEO tools and platforms have made it easy to implement. Here are some noteworthy integrations and support as of 2025 that you should know:

Bing Webmaster Tools: Aside from providing analytics on IndexNow usage, Bing Webmaster Tools (WMT) allows you to submit URLs via API or interface. Note that using the automated API is more efficient for large sites. The IndexNow Insights feature, launched in late 2023, gives a quick view of how many URLs you’ve submitted recently, how many were indexed, and flags any that were discovered by Bing outside of IndexNow, which can indicate gaps in your implementation if important URLs show up there. This tool will be able to guide your technical SEO team to improve coverage.
Content Management Systems (CMS): Many CMSs have added native IndexNow support. Tailoring content based on the user's location can improve search result visibility and enhance user engagement.
WordPress: As mentioned, plugins like Yoast SEO, RankMath, and the official Bing IndexNow plugin can handle the pings for you. If your enterprise site is on WordPress VIP or a large WordPress multisite, leveraging these plugins can save development time.
Wix: The website builder Wix partnered with Microsoft to enable IndexNow automatically for all its premium users. That means Wix sites, often considered small business sites, but can include some enterprise sites, now silently push URL updates to search engines with no effort from the user. This trend of platform-level support is growing.
Other Builders: Duda, Joomla, and other site builders have also looked into supporting IndexNow. Always check your platform’s latest SEO features. What required custom dev work in 2022 might be a built-in checkbox by 2025.
Custom CMS: For homegrown systems, you might build a small module. Given IndexNow is just an HTTP request, virtually any environment (Java, .NET, Python, JavaScript, etc.) can implement it. Developers can also use third-party libraries or services which popped up to assist with IndexNow.
CDNs and Cloud Services: As noted with Cloudflare’s Crawler Hints, infrastructure providers can implement IndexNow at the network level. Cloudflare detects changes when the cache is cleared or content changes on their edge and informs IndexNow. This means even legacy sites that didn’t build their own integration can benefit if they sit behind Cloudflare. Akamai and other CDN providers have also been exploring similar functionalities. If your enterprise uses a CDN, inquire if they support IndexNow or plan to. Enabling it could be as simple as a config change.
SEO SaaS Tools: Enterprise SEO platforms (like BrightEdge, Conductor, etc.) have started to incorporate technical SEO recommendations around IndexNow. Some tools might alert you “X% of your recent pages are not being IndexNow-fed to Bing” or provide dashboards of indexation speed. There are also services that queue and manage IndexNow submissions across multiple sites, which can be handy if you run a portfolio of domains.
Internal Systems: If your site has an internal search or site map generator, hooking IndexNow there can allow for any new pages found internally to be pushed externally. Some enterprise teams create an internal “URL change feed” that both notifies their site search and triggers IndexNow for external search.

Overall, implementing IndexNow has become easier to implement thanks to broad industry support. In many cases, it’s more about turning on a feature than building the integration from scratch. As Barry Schwartz wrote, “If you have not yet adopted IndexNow, you probably should investigate what it would take to make it work for your website. If you are using Cloudflare, then all you need to do is toggle on a switch, plus many CMS platforms support IndexNow out of the box.”

Best Practices for Using IndexNow (2025) and SEO Trends

While IndexNow is a powerful tool, it works best in tandem with established SEO best practices. In order to remain competitive in search engines outside of Google, it may be a good idea to incorporate IndexNow into a comprehensive SEO strategy. Here are some best practices and considerations in 2025:

Continue Using XML Sitemaps

Do not abolish your XML sitemaps after enabling IndexNow. Google and other search engines that aren’t part of IndexNow still rely on sitemaps heavily. Even Bing and peers will still use sitemaps to discover URLs that might not have been individually submitted. Sitemaps serve as a full inventory of your site’s content, whereas IndexNow is focused on recent changes. Keep sitemaps updated with < lastmod> dates if possible, and make sure they’re registered in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools (WMT).

Leverage Schema Markup (Structured Data)

Faster indexing means your content and its structured data gets picked up quicker, which can be important for better results. Make sure that your pages, especially product pages or articles, have up-to-date schema markup (e.g., Product schema with price, availability, Article schema with publication date, etc.).

This way, when Bing or other engines index the page via IndexNow, they immediately understand the content details and can display rich snippets. For e-commerce, this is crucial. Imagine updating a product’s price and stock status: with IndexNow the page is re-crawled promptly, and with proper schema, the search engine can instantly update the price shown in search results. In 2025, search engines and even AI assistants heavily utilize structured data.

Fabrice Canel from Microsoft even suggested that having fresh content with schema and pushing it via IndexNow helps their AI and search features stay up-to-date.

Maintain High Content Quality

IndexNow will get your content into search indices faster, but it won’t make poor content rank any better. All the traditional SEO pillars remain as important as ever in 2025. Make sure that the pages you’re fast-tracking are worthy of ranking. Thin or duplicate content won’t magically improve by being indexed faster; in fact, faster indexing of subpar pages could expose them to scrutiny.

Bing’s index could possibly flag low-quality pages. Creating helpful content that aligns with user search intent is crucial for achieving high rankings and maintaining user engagement.

Monitor Crawl Errors and Indexation

With great power (instant indexing) comes great responsibility to monitor outcomes. Use tools like the IndexNow Insights in Bing WMT and Index Coverage reports in Google Search Console to make sure that pages are indexing properly.

If IndexNow submissions result in errors, say a page wasn’t indexed due to robots.txt or noindex tags, address those issues promptly. It’s easy for an automated system to accidentally submit URLs that shouldn’t be indexed (e.g., staging pages or filters). Make sure your integration filters out any non-canonical or undesirable URLs.

Regularly auditing the list of URLs you’ve submitted via IndexNow versus what’s indexed can catch problems early.

Internal Linking and Navigation

Just because IndexNow can notify search engines about a page doesn’t mean you should ignore your site’s internal linking. Internal links remain crucial for SEO. MAke sure that new pages are linked from relevant sections of your site so that visitors and crawlers from other avenues can find them.

Google will still rely on your site’s internal links to discover new pages, so you absolutely need to link new content in menus, category pages, XML sitemap, etc. A well-structured site with logical internal links also benefits IndexNow because once the search engine crawls the submitted page, it will easily move through your site via those links, discovering related content.

In short, IndexNow gets the crawler to your door faster, but your site structure still guides it through the house.

Avoid Overuse and Spammy Behavior

Only ping when it makes sense. Some sites might be tempted to ping very frequently or for every minor change, like a single character edit. This isn’t necessary and could look spammy. Follow the guideline of waiting a few minutes between subsequent changes on the same URL.

Also, don’t try to use IndexNow for pages that violate guidelines, like thin affiliate pages or doorway pages, thinking you can sneak them in. Search engines will still apply quality criteria and may choose not to index URLs that don’t meet their standards. IndexNow is not a loophole for indexing forbidden content; it’s a tool for efficient indexing of legitimate content.

Keep an Eye on Google

Since Google isn’t on IndexNow currently, stay tuned for any changes in their stance. In 2025, Google still relies on their own crawling and has cited “very efficient crawling” as a reason to not join IndexNow.

Google has its own Indexing API that is restricted to job postings and livestream content at the moment, and continues to improve how quickly it finds content via sitemaps and links. Make sure your Google-facing SEO is also optimized: use Google’s Ping RPC to notify updates to your sitemap, use Google’s Pub/Subhub and API where applicable.

This way, all engines get the fastest possible notification of changes, one way or another.

Use Proper Headers & Meta Tags

On each page, continue using the proper meta tags (like canonical tags, meta descriptions, etc.) and header structure (H1, H2, etc. reflecting content hierarchy). When IndexNow brings a search engine to your page, you want the page to be SEO-ready. If you update a page’s title or H1, that’s a significant change and you will want to be sure to ping it.

Make sure that the new content is clearly indicated with proper HTML semantics so search engines can interpret the change. Semantic HTML and clean meta data help processes your changes correctly (e.g., recognizing that the title of an event changed) when the engine crawls via IndexNow.

Structured Logging

Internally, log all IndexNow submissions you send out. This helps your team diagnose issues (e.g., if a URL was not indexed, you can confirm if it was actually submitted). Logging can include timestamp, URL, and response status from the API. Over time, analyzing these logs against indexation can reveal patterns (e.g., certain sections of the site frequently not indexed due to quality issues).

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

In 2025, IndexNow has emerged as a tool for how websites get their content indexed, especially benefiting large e-commerce and enterprise sites where agility and efficiency are paramount. You don’t need to know the nitty-gritty of the code, but understanding IndexNow’s impact can help you lead your SEO and development teams in the right direction. Here are the key takeaways from this guide:

IndexNow = Speed: It’s a push-notification system for search indexing that dramatically cuts down the time for search engines to discover updates. Instead of waiting days or weeks for new or updated content to appear in search results, IndexNow helps it happen almost instantly. This means fresher content in SERPs and the ability to capitalize on new opportunities faster than competitors.
Broad Adoption (Except Google): IndexNow is supported by Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, and other major engines, which collectively reach hundreds of millions of users. These engines even share the submitted URLs among themselves, so a single submission goes a long way. Google, while not participating currently, has its own fast-indexing mechanisms. So use IndexNow for where it’s supported, and continue best practices for Google alongside. Don’t let Google’s non-involvement deter you; the protocol is bringing benefits on other engines (e.g., 17% of new Bing search clicks coming via IndexNow-discovered URLs).
Crawl Budget Optimization: IndexNow helps search engines crawl your site more efficiently. By telling them what changed, you solidify that your crawl budget is spent on important pages, leading to efficient indexing and less load from unnecessary crawls. This is particularly valuable for very large sites. It aligns with a more sustainable web ecosystem by avoiding the “crawl wastage” of old methods.
Easy Implementation & Wide Support: Implementing IndexNow is not a heavy lift. Generating a key and setting up automated pings can often be done with existing plugins or a few lines of code. Many platforms (WordPress, Wix, Cloudflare, etc.) already have one-click solutions or built-in integration. If your platform supports IndexNow, turn it on; if not, ask your dev team to implement it, which is a straightforward task in most cases.
Comprehensive SEO Strategy Required: IndexNow is not a silver bullet, but rather a powerful accelerator. Continue to follow SEO best practices by maintaining XML sitemaps, building internal links, producing high-quality content, and using structured data. Future proofing your SEO strategy by staying updated with the latest trends and technologies is essential for long-term success. Remember that what gets indexed still needs to be relevant and valuable to rank well. Think of IndexNow as a new standard for technical SEO hygiene, like HTTPS or mobile-friendliness.

By embracing IndexNow, e-commerce and enterprise websites can stay ahead in the SEO game when thinking outside of the scope of Google and standard indexation methodology. As search engines evolve, the trend is clearly toward more real-time indexing and better collaboration between sites and crawlers. Marketing leaders who understand and implement it will enable their organizations to be more visible, more agile, and more efficient across all search engines globally.