IndexNow: 3.5 Billion URLs Daily, Without Google

A new product page goes live. On Google, it takes days or weeks before it shows up in the index. On Bing, Yandex, and several other search engines, it can take seconds. The difference is IndexNow: a push protocol a website uses to actively tell search engines which URLs are new, have changed, or have been deleted. Instead of waiting for the next crawl, the server reports the change itself.

Why IndexNow matters for technical SEO

Classic indexing follows the pull principle. Search engine crawlers visit a website at intervals they choose themselves and only discover changes on the next pass. On large or frequently changing sites, this wastes crawl budget and delays visibility. IndexNow reverses this principle: the website pushes the information instead of the search engine pulling it.

The protocol's scale makes clear that it is no longer a niche tool. According to Microsoft, over 3.5 billion URLs are submitted via IndexNow every day, and 18 percent of all newly clicked URLs in web search results are related to the protocol. The independent summary on Wikipedia cites 2.5 billion submitted URLs for 2024 and 17 percent of all clicked Bing URLs coming from IndexNow. Growth has been steep: in September 2023, over 60 million websites used the protocol and submitted over 1.4 billion URLs per day.

For B2B companies in the DACH region, the second part of the promise is what counts: indexing without depending on a single provider. If you rely solely on Google's crawl logic, you have no leverage over timing. IndexNow gives you that leverage back, at least for the participating search engines.

How the push protocol works technically

IndexNow rests on three building blocks: an API key, host verification via a key file, and a simple HTTP endpoint.

Generate an API key: The site operator creates a key of 8 to 128 characters; lowercase and uppercase letters (a-z, A-Z), digits (0-9), and hyphens are allowed. This key identifies the website to the search engines.

Place the key file: A text file with the key as both its file name and its content goes into the publicly accessible root directory, for example at https://www.example.com/{key}.txt. This proves that the operator controls the host. Without this host verification, the search engines reject the submission. That is exactly what stops anyone from submitting URLs that belong to someone else.

Submit URLs via POST: Changed URLs are sent as JSON to an endpoint, for example https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow or directly to https://www.bing.com/indexnow. The protocol shares every submission with all participating search engines, so a single submission is enough. A single URL can also be submitted with a simple GET request; the POST endpoint accepts up to 10,000 URLs per request as a list.

That is all it takes. There is no OAuth authentication, no per-account quota, and no complex setup. This simplicity is the reason for its broad adoption.

Which search engines participate and why Google is missing

IndexNow participants include Bing (Microsoft, co-initiator with Yandex), Yandex (market leader in Russia), Naver (market leader in South Korea), Seznam.cz (relevant in the Czech Republic), and Yep (the search engine from Ahrefs). According to the IndexNow FAQ, Amazon (Amazonbot) now participates as well. A single submission reaches all participants at the same time.

Google's absence is deliberate. The company does not participate in IndexNow and continues to operate its own pull-based crawling infrastructure instead of adopting the push system. The reason is structural: Google has enough crawl capacity to discover changes promptly on its own and has little incentive to hand indexing signals over to an open protocol it does not control.

The "without Google" argument needs context: IndexNow does not replace Google indexing. It adds a channel to all other relevant search engines. If you only think about Google in the DACH region, you overlook that this additional channel is free and takes little effort to set up.

Implementing IndexNow cleanly in Next.js

Next.js offers no native IndexNow integration. The clean approach is a post-build script that submits only changed URLs.

Sitemap as the source: next-sitemap generates a current XML sitemap with every build. It serves as the list of all indexable URLs.

Key file in the public directory: The {key}.txt file sits in /public so that Next.js serves it statically. This keeps host verification permanently in place.

Diff-based submission: The script compares the current sitemap with the last known state (for example, a snapshot stored in the repository or cache) and submits only newly added or changed URLs. This is the most important step: pushing the entire sitemap with every deploy counts as over-submission and brings no benefit.

CI/CD integration: The script runs as the last step of the deploy pipeline, after the new pages are live. A good trigger is a webhook on successful deployment, not on every commit. That way, only changes that have actually been published get submitted.

Important: only submit a URL once it is reachable at its final address and returns a 200 status. Pinging URLs that still show a 404 or a redirect is counterproductive.

How IndexNow, XML sitemaps, and the Google Indexing API differ

The three mechanisms solve different problems and are not mutually exclusive.

XML sitemaps: The baseline. They list all indexable URLs along with their last-modified date and are read by all search engines, including Google. Sitemaps are passive: they invite crawlers but do not replace active notification.

IndexNow: The active push to all participating engines, including Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, and Yep. Suited to immediate notifications for any kind of content change. It complements the sitemap and does not replace it.

Google Indexing API: Often misunderstood. According to Google, the Indexing API is officially intended only for pages with JobPosting or BroadcastEvent markup (livestreams). It is not a general push channel for arbitrary URLs. If you submit regular pages through it, you are misusing it.

The sensible combination for a DACH B2B site: a complete XML sitemap for all engines, IndexNow as an immediate push to all participating search engines, and for Google the regular sitemap plus clean internal linking so that Googlebot finds changes quickly on its own.

Relevance of Bing and IndexNow in the DACH region

Bing's market share in Austria is modest but not negligible. According to StatCounter, Google holds 81.87 percent and Bing 9.01 percent of the search engine market in Austria (2026). So nearly one in ten searches runs on Bing rather than Google.

The Copilot integration makes this share more important. Microsoft feeds its AI assistants from the Bing index. If your pages get indexed quickly in Bing, you start from a better position for discoverability in Copilot, which many Austrian companies already have through Microsoft 365. For B2B discoverability beyond Google, this is a concrete, measurable lever: part of your target audience works in exactly the environments that use Bing as a data source.

IndexNow, AI crawlers, and GEO

Indexing speed also matters for visibility in AI systems. Generative search and LLM-based answers draw on search indexes and on their own crawls. Content that lands in the Bing index quickly becomes available earlier as a source for Microsoft's AI products.

At the same time, bot traffic is exploding. According to Cloudflare, the share of OpenAI's GPTBot rose from 2.2 to 7.7 percent between May 2024 and May 2025, with requests up 305 percent (international data). Every additional crawler puts load on your server. This is where IndexNow helps twice: it saves crawl budget because participating search engines do not have to search speculatively for changes, and it cuts unnecessary server load because changes are reported in a targeted way instead of being found through blanket crawling. If you push precisely, you give the engines exactly the information they would otherwise have to work out through repeated crawling.

Best practices and common mistakes

Submit URLs only for your own hosts: IndexNow accepts only URLs from the verified host. This is the protocol's central security rule, not an optional detail.

Do not treat the API key as a secret, but manage it properly: The key is publicly available as a file in the root directory anyway. It does not protect against anyone reading it; it only proves host control. Still, use a separate key for each property, and replace it if you suspect misuse.

Avoid over-submission: Repeatedly submitting the same unchanged URL achieves nothing and can be treated as a spam signal. Submit only real changes.

Respect rate limits: The engines throttle excessive submissions. Diff-based logic and sensible batching per deploy keep the volume low.

Most common mistake: Pushing the entire sitemap with every build. That is over-submission with no benefit. The second most common mistake is submitting URLs that return a redirect, a 404, or a noindex. A submitted URL should be consistent with the rest of your technical SEO signals.

Fitting IndexNow into a modern technical SEO architecture

IndexNow is one building block, not a substitute for solid technical SEO. The submitted URL has to match your other SEO signals.

Canonical: Submit only the canonical version of a page, not parameter or duplicate URLs. How widely the canonical tag is used shows how established this signal is: 65 percent of mobile and 69 percent of desktop pages use rel=canonical (2024, international data).

robots.txt and noindex: Anything blocked by robots.txt or excluded with noindex does not belong in an IndexNow submission. Contradictory signals confuse the search engine.

hreflang: For multilingual DACH sites (for example Austria, Germany, Switzerland), submit all language versions so that the engines pick up the complete hreflang clusters quickly.

Structured data: Schema markup makes your pages easier for search engines and AI systems to understand. A quickly indexed page with clean schema becomes available sooner for rich results and generative answers.

Core Web Vitals: Fast indexing only helps if the page also performs. The bar is high: according to the Web Almanac, 48 percent of mobile pages pass the Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) (2024, international data). IndexNow speeds up indexing but does not replace optimizing load time and interactivity.

At the infrastructure level, IndexNow fits modern edge and CDN setups. They serve the key file and content quickly, which supports consistent submissions. Current transport protocols are widespread here: HTTP/3 is supported by around 40 percent of the ten million largest websites (July 2026, international data).

Cloudflare Crawler Hints as the automatic route

If you do not want to maintain your own implementation, you can enable IndexNow via Cloudflare Crawler Hints. This feature automatically detects when content changes and sends the corresponding IndexNow notifications, with no script of your own and no key management required. Cloudflare handles the key and the submission. For sites that already run behind Cloudflare, this is the fastest way to start: a toggle in the dashboard instead of a post-build script. The price is less control over exactly which URLs get submitted and when. For complex, diff-driven logic, your own implementation remains more precise.

GDPR assessment when pinging third-party search engines

From an Austrian and DACH B2B perspective, data protection is usually not a problem here, but you should still assess it deliberately. IndexNow transmits URLs and the API key to the participating search engines. URLs of publicly accessible pages are not personal data as long as the address itself contains no personal data in its parameters. That is exactly the point to check: URLs with query parameters containing personal data (such as tokens, names, or IDs) generally do not belong in a public sitemap, and therefore not in an IndexNow submission either.

The transfer happens server to server, without involving the visitor's device or cookies. No consent requirement arises under ePrivacy logic, because the user's device is not accessed. The usual due diligence still applies: Yandex is headquartered in Russia, a third country without an adequacy decision. Only URLs that are public anyway are transmitted, though, not a set of personal data, so the risk is low in practice. You cannot limit submissions to individual search engines: every submitted URL is automatically shared with all participating search engines, including Yandex, regardless of which endpoint receives the submission. If you want to rule out any transfer to Russia, you have to do without IndexNow.

Next steps

IndexNow is a small technical building block with a clear benefit: immediate indexing on all relevant search engines except Google, with minimal implementation effort. The biggest lever is clean, diff-based submission and consistency with your other SEO signals. For DACH B2B sites, enabling it pays off, whether through Cloudflare Crawler Hints or your own post-build script in Next.js. As a next step, connect it to monitoring in Bing Webmaster Tools and align it with your canonical, hreflang, and sitemap strategy.