Technical pillar / check indexnow-readiness

IndexNow: notify Bing when pages change

Guidance only. IndexNow lets a site tell participating search engines the moment a page is added, updated or deleted. Nobody outside your site can see whether you use it, so we never score it.

By Shimon Carroll, Founder, SEO for AI Agents · Last updated

What this check measures

Nothing on your site: an IndexNow key file is named after the key itself and can live anywhere on your host, so an outside audit cannot find it and we do not guess. The finding explains the protocol and how to turn it on, with the source for each step.

Why it matters

IndexNow's documentation says engines that adopt the protocol agree that submitted URLs are shared with all other participating engines. indexnow.org lists support from Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep; Google is not listed. Bing's Webmaster Guidelines ask sites to notify IndexNow when content is added, updated or deleted, so that Copilot and grounding results do not reference outdated URLs. We use IndexNow on our own site.

How we score it

Advisory. It never scores, never counts in coverage and never enters the action plan.

Confidence-flag rules

Not applicable: this is guidance, not a measurement. The key can live anywhere on your host, so we never score it.

Common mistakes

  • Submitting every URL on every deploy instead of the URLs that changed.
  • Hosting the key file somewhere other than the root without sending keyLocation with each submission.
  • Expecting IndexNow to speed up Google, which does not take part.

How to fix it

Check your CMS, SEO plugin or CDN first: the IndexNow FAQ lists WordPress, Shopify, Wix, GoDaddy, Duda, Joomla!, Drupal and other platforms with native or plugin support, and says Cloudflare offers native integration. Otherwise generate a key, host {key}.txt at your site root, and submit changed URLs to an IndexNow endpoint.

Primary sources

Changelog

  • · Initial publication. Always advisory. Facts re-read on indexnow.org in a real browser on 2026-10-07.
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