IndexNow FAQ
Short answers to common questions. New to IndexNow? Start with the setup guide.
Which search engines use IndexNow?
Submitting to one participating engine shares your URLs with all of them. The list that indexnow.org publishes, read on 31 October 2026, names Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, the Internet Archive and Amazonbot.
The list can change. indexnow.org keeps the current one.
Does Google use IndexNow?
No. Google does not take part in IndexNow.
To tell Google about changes, use Google's own tools, such as Search Console and a sitemap. Submitting here does not notify Google.
How often should I submit URLs?
Submit when a page is new, changed or deleted, and only then. Engines ask for new, changed or deleted URLs only.
Sending the same unchanged pages again and again risks being throttled. IndexNow answers too many requests with a 429 response, see error 429.
My submission was accepted. Why is my page not indexed?
Accepted means IndexNow received your URLs. It does not mean a page is crawled or indexed yet. Each search engine decides when to crawl a page and whether to include it.
Check that the page is public, returns a 200 response and has useful content. See what happens after you submit.
Should I use www.example.com or example.com?
Use exactly the host your pages are served from. www.example.com and example.com are different hosts, and IndexNow wants one host per submission.
URLs on any other host than the one in the Your site field are skipped. If your site redirects example.com to www.example.com, enter www.example.com, and put the key file on that host.
Should I paste a list or give a sitemap?
Either works. Paste a list or upload a file when you know which pages changed. Give a sitemap when you want us to read the pages from it.
For a sitemap you can send only the pages changed in the last 1, 7 or 30 days, or all pages. The default is 7 days. This uses the lastmod dates in the sitemap. If a sitemap has no lastmod values, the check says so and offers to include all pages.
What does this tool store?
The email and the domain are saved only when you tick the box, and only if you typed an email. Unticked, your email is not stored or logged anywhere.
The submission log holds no email, key or IP address. It records the domain, counts of URLs, the IndexNow response and how long the request took.
Your IndexNow key is never stored. The tool holds only a one-way hash of it for 15 minutes, between the check and the send. There are no cookies and no analytics. Details are in the privacy policy.
Does the tool respect robots.txt?
We do not read robots.txt for a sitemap or key file you ask us to fetch, because you asked us to fetch your own file. The bot fetches only that address, once per check, and does not crawl. See the bot page.
What are the limits?
One submission sends up to 10,000 URLs. Anything beyond that is listed as over the limit, so you can submit it in another batch.
A pasted list can be up to 2 MB and an uploaded file up to 5 MB.
A sitemap check reads up to 20 sitemap files, collects up to 50,000 URLs, takes at most 30 seconds in total and accepts files up to 10 MB compressed and 50 MB uncompressed. A sitemap index is followed one level deep, and child sitemaps must be on the same host.
Why is this tool free?
ziptie.ai operates it. We ask for an email address for occasional marketing about ziptie.ai, which you can decline. The email is optional and never required to use the tool.
What does an IndexNow key look like?
A key is 8 to 128 characters: letters, numbers and dashes. The key generator makes a 32-character key in your browser. The key file is a text file named after the key, containing only the key.
See how to create and upload the key file.
Why can't it check my staging site?
For safety, we refuse addresses that are private, loopback or internal, ports other than 80 and 443, and URLs with a username or password in them. A staging site on a private network cannot be reached from here, so it cannot be checked.