What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an open, royalty-free protocol that lets website owners tell search engines the instant a URL is added, updated, or removed. Traditionally, search engines discover changes by re-crawling your site on their own schedule — which can take days or weeks. IndexNow flips that model: rather than waiting to be crawled, you proactively ping the search engines with the exact URLs that changed, so they can prioritise crawling them. The protocol was introduced in 2021 by Microsoft Bing and Yandex and has since been adopted by a growing list of search engines.
The mechanics are deliberately simple. You generate a secret key, host it as a small text file on your domain, and then send a request containing your host, the key, and the list of URLs you want crawled. The receiving search engine verifies the key file belongs to your domain and queues the URLs for crawling. Because the participating engines share IndexNow data with one another, a single submission can reach the entire network — you don't have to maintain a separate integration for every search engine.
Today the participating search engines include Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver, and Yep, and the protocol is also consumed by content delivery and SEO platforms that pass submissions through. The result is faster discovery, less wasted crawl budget on both sides, and a cleaner signal to search engines about what genuinely changed on your site.
What this free tool does
The Online IndexNow Submission Tool above is the fastest way to push a batch of URLs to IndexNow without writing any code or signing up. Paste a list of URLs (one per line) or point it at an XML sitemap, supply your IndexNow key, choose which engines to notify, and submit. Before anything is sent, the tool fetches your key file from the root of your domain and confirms it matches — this proves you control the site and is what keeps the tool safe to offer for free.
If you supply a sitemap, the tool reads the URLs from a standard sitemap (a urlset document). If the link is actually a sitemap index — a sitemap that points to other sitemaps — the tool will ask you to log in instead, because expanding an entire index tree safely is a job for the full BetterIndexNow platform. You can optionally leave your name and email to receive a short summary by email once the submission completes.
How to create your IndexNow key
An IndexNow key is just a string of 8 to 128 characters made up of letters (a–f, A–F), digits (0–9), and dashes. In practice, almost everyone uses a random hexadecimal value — for example, a UUID with the dashes stripped out, or any random hex string of 32 characters. The key is a shared secret: anyone who knows it and can prove it's hosted on your domain can submit URLs for that domain, so treat it like a lightweight credential.
Once you have a key, host it as a plain text file. The file name must be your key followed by .txt, and the file's entire contents must be exactly the key — nothing else. Upload it to the root of your site so it is reachable at a URL like https://example.com/your-key.txt. That is the location search engines (and this tool) will fetch to verify ownership.
A few practical tips. The key file must be served over a URL on the same host as the pages you submit: if your pages live on www.example.com, the key file has to be at https://www.example.com/your-key.txt, not the apex domain. Make sure your server returns the file with a 200 OK status and that no redirect rewrites the path. And keep the file in place — if you delete it later, engines will start rejecting your submissions because they can no longer verify the key.
Should I submit to each search engine separately, or is Global IndexNow fine?
This is the most common question about IndexNow, and the good news is that the answer is simple: for the vast majority of sites, submitting once is enough. The whole point of the protocol is that participating search engines share submissions with each other. When you notify the shared Global IndexNow endpoint — or any single participating engine such as Bing — your URLs are propagated to every other participant automatically. You do not need to send the same URLs to Bing, then Yandex, then Seznam one by one to be “safe.”
So why does this tool let you pick individual engines at all? Two reasons. First, control and redundancy: some site owners prefer to be explicit about exactly which endpoints they hit, or want belt-and-braces delivery to a specific engine that matters most for their audience (for example, Naver for a Korean-language site, or Yandex for a Russian-language one). Second, transparency: submitting per-engine lets you see each engine's individual acceptance response, which is useful for debugging host or key-file issues. There is no SEO penalty for submitting to multiple endpoints — the network is designed to deduplicate — so choose whatever gives you the most confidence. If you're unsure, leave Global IndexNow selected and you are covered.
The one engine that genuinely stands apart is Google. Google does not participate in IndexNow. It uses its own crawling pipeline plus the Google Indexing API, which is rate-limited (around 200 URLs per day per project) and officially intended for specific content types. That is why Google is not part of this free tool. If reaching Google quickly matters to you, you can connect a Google account in BetterIndexNow and submit through the Indexing API in parallel with IndexNow — all from one dashboard.
Submission is discovery, not a guarantee of indexing
It is worth setting expectations clearly. Submitting a URL via IndexNow asks a search engine to come and look — it is a strong signal that something is new or has changed, and it usually shortens the time to crawl considerably. What it cannot do is force a page into the index. Whether a URL ultimately gets indexed still depends on the engine's quality assessment, your robots.txt rules and meta robots directives, the canonical you declare, your crawl budget, and the overall health and trust of your domain.
Use IndexNow as part of a healthy publishing workflow: ship or update a page, submit it, and let the engines prioritise the crawl. Pair it with a well-maintained sitemap and clean internal linking, and you give search engines every reason to find and evaluate your content quickly. For ongoing sites, automating this — so every new or updated URL is submitted the moment it goes live — removes the manual step entirely.
Limits, fair use, and going further
Because this tool is free and unauthenticated, it applies a per-domain cap on how many URLs you can submit within a rolling 24-hour window, alongside a per-visitor request rate limit. These limits exist to keep the service fast for everyone and to prevent abuse — and crucially, you can only submit for a domain whose key file you control, so nobody can spam URLs for a site they don't own.
If you outgrow the free limits, want to submit large or nested sitemaps, need Google Indexing API support, or want to track exactly which URLs each engine accepted over time, the full BetterIndexNow platform automates all of it — including automatic sitemap monitoring that submits new and changed URLs for you as soon as they appear. Create a free account to get started, or read the FAQ for more detail on engine-specific behaviour.
Frequently asked questions
- What is IndexNow and which search engines support it?
IndexNow is an open protocol — launched in 2021 by Microsoft Bing and Yandex — that lets website owners instantly notify search engines when URLs are created, updated, or deleted. Instead of waiting for a crawler to rediscover a page on its own schedule, you push a lightweight notification the moment something changes.
Participating search engines include Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver, and Yep. Crucially, these engines share IndexNow submissions with each other, so a single notification to one participating endpoint reaches the whole network.
- Is this IndexNow submission tool free?
Yes. The Online IndexNow Submission Tool is completely free and requires no signup — you only need a valid IndexNow key hosted on your domain.
To keep the tool fair and protected from abuse, there is a per-domain limit on how many URLs you can submit in a rolling 24-hour window. If you need automatic sitemap submission, per-URL delivery tracking, Google Indexing API support, and higher limits, create a free account.
- How do I create an IndexNow API key?
An IndexNow key is a string of 8 to 128 characters using letters (a–f, A–F), digits (0–9), and dashes. Most people use a random hexadecimal value — for example a UUID with the dashes removed.
- Generate a random key, e.g. a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6.
- Create a text file named <your-key>.txt whose entire contents are exactly that key.
- Upload it to your site root, e.g. https://example.com/a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6.txt.
Search engines fetch that file to confirm you control the domain before accepting submissions.
- Where do I put the IndexNow key file?
Host the file at the root of the exact host you are submitting, named <key>.txt, containing only the key.
The host must match your URLs — apex and www. are different hosts, so https://www.example.com URLs need the key file at https://www.example.com/<key>.txt. This free tool verifies the key at the host root before submitting.
- Do I need to submit to each search engine separately, or is Global IndexNow enough?
For most sites, Global IndexNow is enough. Participating engines share submissions with one another, so notifying the shared endpoint (or any single participating engine) propagates your URLs across the whole network.
Submitting to individual engines is mainly useful for redundancy or to be explicit about a particular engine. There is no penalty for submitting to several endpoints — the protocol deduplicates — but it is not required.
- Does Google support IndexNow?
No. Google does not officially support IndexNow. Google relies on its own crawling and the Google Indexing API, which is intended for specific content types and is capped at roughly 200 URLs per day per project.
That is why Google isn't part of this free tool. To push URLs to Google as well, connect a Google account in BetterIndexNow and use the Indexing API alongside IndexNow — start free.
- How many URLs can I submit with the free tool?
By default the free tool accepts up to 100 URLs per domain in any rolling 24-hour window. This keeps the service fair and protected from abuse.
If you provide a sitemap, the tool reads URLs from a standard XML sitemap (urlset). Sitemap index files aren't processed here — log in to expand and submit those. For larger or recurring jobs, a free account raises these limits and adds automatic sitemap monitoring.
- Does submitting a URL guarantee it will be indexed?
No. IndexNow tells search engines that a URL is new or changed and invites them to crawl it sooner — it does not guarantee indexing.
Indexing still depends on the engine's quality signals, your robots/meta directives, crawl budget, and overall site health. IndexNow speeds up discovery; it doesn't override an engine's indexing decisions.