IndexNow, sitemaps and pings: how to get new pages indexed faster

Publishing a page is only half the job: until a search engine crawls it, nobody can find it. Crawlers revisit sites on their own schedule, so a fresh article can wait for days. Three mechanisms shorten that wait — and they are not interchangeable.

IndexNow: tell Bing and Yandex directly

IndexNow is an open protocol launched by Microsoft Bing and Yandex in 2021. Instead of waiting for a crawler, your site sends a short request listing the URLs that were added, changed or deleted. Participating search engines share submissions with each other, so one request reaches all of them — today that includes Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver.

How it works:

1. 01Generate a key (8 to 128 characters) and publish it as a text file at the root of your site, for example https://example.com/<key>.txt.
2. 02Send the changed URLs to the shared endpoint — up to 10,000 per request.
3. 03The engine fetches the key file to confirm that you own the site and schedules the URLs for crawling.

POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{
  "host": "onlyapps.org",
  "key": "<your-key>",
  "keyLocation": "https://onlyapps.org/<your-key>.txt",
  "urlList": ["https://onlyapps.org/blog/indexnow-sitemaps-pings"]
}

A 200 or 202 response means the submission was accepted. It does not mean the page will rank — only that it will be crawled sooner.

Sitemaps: still the main channel for Google

Google does not use IndexNow. It discovers new pages through links and XML sitemaps, and in 2023 it retired the old sitemap ping endpoint — pinging Google no longer does anything. What works instead:

• ✦Keep a sitemap index that lists every indexable page in every language.
• ✦Set lastmod to the date the content actually changed. Google relies on it only when it is consistently accurate.
• ✦Submit the sitemap once in Search Console and reference it in robots.txt.
• ✦Link new pages from pages that are crawled often, such as the home page or the blog index.

Pings: the old way, still alive for blogs

Before IndexNow, blogs used XML-RPC pings to notify update services and blog search engines. Some services still accept them — which is why tools like our app Pingler exist: you add a page address and it notifies ping services in one tap. Pings are cheap and harmless, but they reach a smaller audience than IndexNow and do nothing for Google.

What we do on onlyapps.org

This site combines all three approaches automatically:

• ✦every publish, update or removal puts the affected URLs — in all three languages — into an IndexNow queue that is sent as one batch a minute later;
• ✦sitemaps are split by content type, with lastmod taken from the moment the content really changed and hreflang alternates for each language;
• ✦the IndexNow key is generated on the first start and served from the site root.

Checklist

• ✦Publish an IndexNow key file and submit changed URLs, including deletions.
• ✦Maintain an accurate sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Yandex Webmaster.
• ✦Do not fake freshness: change lastmod only when the content changes.
• ✦Link new pages from the home page or a hub page.
• ✦Treat pings as a bonus for blogs, not as your main channel.