How to Set Up IndexNow for Faster Bing Indexing

Published April 20, 2026 · 6 min read

What is IndexNow and why it matters in 2026

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets website owners notify search engines the moment a URL is published, updated, or deleted. You send an HTTP request to api.indexnow.org, and every participating engine gets the signal simultaneously. No more waiting for Bingbot to crawl your site on its own schedule.

The protocol launched in late 2021 as a Microsoft/Yandex joint project. As of early 2026, over 2.5 billion URLs have been submitted through IndexNow — more than double the 1.2 billion from six months prior. That growth is not accidental. IndexNow-submitted URLs now account for roughly 17% of new URLs clicked in Bing web search results, which tells you the URLs being submitted are real pages that real people visit.

The engines currently supporting IndexNow are Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam. You submit once to api.indexnow.org, and all four get the notification. One ping, four engines.

Here is why this matters more now than it did in 2022: Bing is the primary web source for ChatGPT. Research shows that roughly 87% of ChatGPT web citations match Bing's top 10 results. If your page is indexed in Bing faster, it becomes available to ChatGPT's search feature faster. IndexNow is not just a Bing play anymore — it is an AI visibility play. Bing's new 2026 IndexNow Insights report and AI Performance Report in Webmaster Tools now let you track exactly how your submitted URLs perform in both traditional search and AI-generated answers.

If you are trying to get your website into ChatGPT search results, IndexNow is one of the fastest levers you can pull.

Step-by-step IndexNow setup

You need three things: an API key, a verification file on your server, and a single HTTP request. That is it.

1. Generate your API key

Your IndexNow API key is just a unique string — think of it as a simple identifier, not a secret. You can generate one at bing.com/indexnow, or just create your own. Any string of hex characters between 8 and 128 characters works. Here is an easy way to make one:

openssl rand -hex 16

That gives you something like a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6. Save this — you will use it in the next two steps.

2. Create the key verification file

IndexNow needs to verify that the person submitting URLs actually controls the site. You do this by placing a text file at your domain root. The filename must be your API key with a .txt extension, and the file content must be the key itself.

# If your key is a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6
# Create this file at your site root:

# Filename: a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6.txt
# Contents: a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6

echo "a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6" > public/a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6.txt

The file must be publicly accessible at https://yourdomain.com/a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6.txt. If you are using a static site generator or framework, place it in your public/ or static/ directory.

3. Submit a URL

Now ping the IndexNow API with a simple GET request:

curl "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=https://yourdomain.com/new-page&key=a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6"

A 200 OK or 202 Accepted response means the submission was received. That is all it takes for a single URL.

4. Verify in Bing Webmaster Tools

Log into Bing Webmaster Tools, navigate to the IndexNow section, and you will see your submitted URLs along with their processing status. The new IndexNow Insights report (launched in 2026) shows submission volume, success rates, and how quickly submitted URLs enter the index.

Automating IndexNow pings

Manually curling each URL gets old fast. For batch submissions or automated workflows, use the POST endpoint with a JSON body:

curl -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "host": "yourdomain.com",
    "key": "a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6",
    "keyLocation": "https://yourdomain.com/a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6.txt",
    "urlList": [
      "https://yourdomain.com/page-1",
      "https://yourdomain.com/page-2",
      "https://yourdomain.com/page-3"
    ]
  }'

The batch endpoint accepts up to 10,000 URLs per request. A few ways to wire this into your workflow:

• CI/CD pipeline: Add a post-deploy step that collects changed URLs from your build output and fires the batch POST. If you use Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages, this is a one-line addition to your build script.
• CMS webhook: Most headless CMS platforms (WordPress, Sanity, Contentful, Strapi) support publish webhooks. Point the webhook at a small serverless function that forwards the URL to IndexNow.
• Cron job: If your site updates on a schedule, a daily or weekly cron that reads your sitemap and submits any URLs modified since the last run works fine.

Here is a minimal deploy script example for a static site:

#!/bin/bash
# After build, submit changed pages to IndexNow
KEY="a1b2c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6"
HOST="yourdomain.com"

# Get list of changed HTML files from git
CHANGED=$(git diff --name-only HEAD~1 HEAD -- '*.html' | \
  sed "s|^|https://$HOST/|" | \
  jq -R -s 'split("\n") | map(select(. != ""))')

curl -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "{\"host\":\"$HOST\",\"key\":\"$KEY\",\"urlList\":$CHANGED}"

Does Google support IndexNow?

No. As of April 2026, Google has not adopted IndexNow and has given no public indication that it will.

Google's position is that its existing crawl infrastructure — Googlebot, the URL Inspection API in Search Console, and its sitemap processing pipeline — already handles content discovery efficiently enough. Whether you agree depends on your experience with Google's crawl budget and how long you have watched a new page sit in "Discovered — currently not indexed" purgatory.

The practical takeaway: do not treat IndexNow as a Google solution. For Google indexing, you still need Google Search Console, a clean sitemap, and internal links pointing to new pages. For everything else — Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, and the AI answer engines that pull from Bing — IndexNow is the fastest path. The two strategies are complementary, not competing.

If your goal is maximum discoverability across all engines, pair IndexNow with a broader search engine submission strategy that covers Google, the smaller engines, and the AI crawler ecosystem.

Common mistakes

IndexNow is simple, which means the mistakes are simple too. Here are the ones we see most often:

• Wrong key file location. The verification file must be at your domain root, not in a subdirectory. yourdomain.com/a1b2c3.txt works. yourdomain.com/keys/a1b2c3.txt does not. If you are using a framework that serves static files from /public or /static, make sure the file ends up at the root URL path after build.
• Key file content mismatch. The content inside the .txt file must exactly match the key in your API requests. No extra whitespace, no trailing newline from your text editor. Use printf instead of echo if your shell adds a newline: printf "yourkey" > public/yourkey.txt
• Submitting unchanged URLs repeatedly. IndexNow is for notifying engines about new or changed content. Blasting your entire sitemap every hour will not help and may get your submissions deprioritized. Only submit URLs that have actually changed.
• Expecting ranking improvements. IndexNow controls indexing speed, not ranking position. Getting a page indexed faster does not mean it will rank higher. You still need content quality, backlinks, and on-page SEO fundamentals. IndexNow just removes the waiting period between publishing and the engine knowing the page exists.
• Forgetting non-IndexNow engines. IndexNow reaches four engines. That is meaningful — especially given the Bing-to-ChatGPT pipeline — but it does not cover Google, DuckDuckGo (which uses Bing's index but does not process IndexNow separately), or the hundreds of smaller engines and directories that feed AI training data. For those, you still need separate submission. A tool like FreeSiteSubmit handles the broader distribution to 500+ engines that IndexNow does not reach.

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