How to set up IndexNow

This guide takes you from nothing to a submitted URL list. It takes about ten minutes.

What is IndexNow?

IndexNow is an open protocol. You use it to tell participating search engines about URLs that are new, changed or deleted, instead of waiting for them to find the change. When you tell one participating engine, it shares the news with the others. Google does not take part in IndexNow.

To prove the site is yours, you publish a small text file that contains a secret-looking key. The engine fetches that file before it trusts your submission.

Set up in six steps

1. Generate a key

   Use the key generator, or make your own. A key is 8 to 128 characters long and uses only these characters: a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and -.

2. Create the key file

   Make a plain text file, saved as UTF-8, whose only content is the key. Name it after the key: if the key is abc12345, the file is abc12345.txt.

3. Upload the key file

   Upload it to the root of your site so that it opens at https://<your-site>/<key>.txt. Open that address in your browser. You should see only the key.

   Cannot use the site root?

   You can put the file anywhere on the same host and give its full address as the key file location (keyLocation in the IndexNow request). A key file in /catalog/ only covers URLs under /catalog/.

   WordPress

   Place the file in the web root with your host's file manager or SFTP. Do not use the media library, which stores files in a dated folder. If an SEO plugin already manages IndexNow for you, it may have created a key file already.

   Cloudflare

   The file must be served from your origin as plain text. Check that no page rule, cache rule or worker rewrites the response into an HTML page, and that the file is reachable without a challenge.

   Shopify-style hosts

   Some hosts do not let you upload to the root. Host the file at any path you can control, then give its full address as the key file location. It must be on the same host as your URLs.

4. Check the key file

   The tool checks the key file before it sends anything, and tells you exactly what is wrong. You can also use the key checker on its own.

   A page instead of a file

   Some content management systems answer every unknown address with a normal page. The key file then looks found (a 200 response) but contains HTML, not your key. Fix it by serving a real file at that address.

5. Choose your URLs

   Send URLs that are new, changed or deleted. You can paste them, upload a .csv or .txt file, or give a sitemap. All URLs must be on exactly the same host: www.example.com and example.com are different hosts. One submission sends up to 10,000 URLs.

6. Submit

   Review the counts, then press the send button. The result tells you what IndexNow answered. If it is an error, the result links to its page: 400, 403, 422 or 429. A 202 means the key is still being validated.

What happens after you submit

Accepted does not mean indexed. It means the engines received your URLs. Each engine decides when to crawl a page and whether to include it. Keep the key file in place. Do not resubmit unchanged pages: sending the same URLs repeatedly risks being throttled.

Troubleshooting