Aug 17, 2026 · 7 min read

IndexNow Setup: Get New Pages Indexed in Hours

IndexNow is the closest thing to a "notify me when I publish" button that search engines offer. Bing, Yandex, Seznam, and Naver promise to crawl submitted URLs within hours — a day at most — instead of whenever their next scheduled crawl happens to reach your site. It's free, open, and once you've set it up it costs seconds per page. The setup has three steps: generate a key, host the key file, and submit URLs. Here's each one, done properly.

Step 1: Generate and keep your key

The key is a long random string — typically 32+ characters — that proves you own your domain. You generate it yourself; there's no registration and no account. Use a secure random generator, not a word or an obvious string, because your key is the only thing stopping someone else from pinging URLs on your behalf. Save it in two places: the text file you're about to host, and a note in your password manager. Lose the file and you can generate a new key, but you'll have to re-host it before any pings are accepted again.

Step 2: Host the key file at your domain root

Create a text file named {your-key}.txt and put exactly the key string in it — nothing else, no spaces, no trailing newline required. Upload it to the root of your domain, so it resolves at:

https://example.com/0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef.txt

When you or the submitter pings a URL, the IndexNow engines fetch that file to confirm you control the domain before accepting the ping. Two details trip people up: it must be at the root, not in a subfolder, and it must live on the same domain you submit URLs for — a www vs non-www mismatch is a common reason verification quietly fails. Once the file is up, load it in a browser to confirm it returns the key.

Step 3: Submit your URLs

With the key in place, submitting is a single HTTP call. The IndexNow endpoint accepts a JSON body listing your site's key, the key location, and one or more URLs:

https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=URL&key=YOUR-KEY

You can test it manually once, then stop — doing this by hand for every publish is exactly the kind of chore people abandon after a week. That's where the URL Submitter comes in: it fires the IndexNow ping for any URL automatically and pairs it with the Google Search Console request (Google isn't an IndexNow partner, so it needs its own request — more on that in our full submission guide). One URL in, both notifications sent.

Verifying it actually worked

After a submission, check the response code: 200 or 202 means the engines accepted the ping. A quick real-world check is a site:yoursite.com/yourpage search on Bing a day later — the page should appear well before Google's crawler gets around to it. If pings return errors, the usual causes are the key file missing, the key not matching the submitted key, or the URL containing parameters that belong to a session. Fix those and re-ping; a 403 or 422 tells you exactly which part is wrong. The whole setup is once — after that, publishing and pinging can be the same action.

Frequently asked questions