AI search and working with a developer
What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an open protocol letting a site notify participating search engines that a URL has changed, instead of waiting for a recrawl. Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver participate; Google does not. One POST reaches all of them.
Also called: instant indexing protocol
How it works
- Generate a key and publish it as a text file at your site root, proving you control the host
- POST a JSON payload listing your host, the key, the key location and the changed URLs
- Participating engines fetch the key file to verify, then queue the URLs
Whether it is worth doing
It costs one script and a key file, and Bing feeds Microsoft Copilot — so it is an AI-visibility lever as well as a classic-search one. It will not help with Google, and no amount of pinging substitutes for pages worth indexing.
The requirement people miss
The key file must be publicly fetchable at your own domain. Submitting from a host you do not control, or before deploying the key file, returns an error rather than doing nothing quietly.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Technical SEO, in the order the problems actually block you covers this properly — 4 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.