What is IndexNow?

What it means for a research store

A site proves ownership by hosting a key file, then sends a simple request listing changed URLs to an IndexNow endpoint. Participating search engines share submissions with each other. Microsoft Bing and Yandex are among the engines that support it; Google does not currently use IndexNow and relies on its own crawling and sitemaps.

IndexNow is most useful for sites whose content changes often, such as stores updating prices, stock and new product pages, and for migrations where many URLs change at once. It speeds discovery; it does not guarantee indexing or ranking.

Use it alongside, not instead of, an accurate XML sitemap with real lastmod dates, correct canonical tags and clean redirects. Submitting URLs that return errors or redirect wastes the signal.

Related terms

• Structured data (JSON-LD): Structured data is machine-readable information about a page, most often written as schema.org vocabulary in a JSON-LD script, that tells search engines and assistants exactly what the page describes.
• llms.txt: llms.txt is a proposed convention for a markdown file at a website’s root (/llms.txt) that gives large language models a concise, link-rich summary of the site and points to fuller text.

Related guides

• Move from Shopify or WooCommerce without losing your search traffic
• Map old URLs before changing your storefront.

Sources

• IndexNow — protocol documentation ↗