IndexNow and Bing Indexing

Bing is easier to get indexed on than Google, and IndexNow is a genuinely good piece of engineering. Both of those things are true, and neither of them is the whole story.

What IndexNow is

IndexNow is an open protocol. When you publish, update or delete a page, your site sends a small notification containing the URL and a verification key. Participating search engines receive it immediately and can crawl within minutes rather than whenever they next get round to you.

Supported by Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver. Adopted by Cloudflare, Wix, Duda and a long list of CMS plugins.

Google does not support IndexNow. Google ran an evaluation of it and has never adopted it. If a plugin or an agency tells you IndexNow gets you indexed on Google faster, that is not accurate. It gets you indexed faster on Bing and its partners, which is worth having, but it is not the same claim.

What IndexNow is genuinely good at

If you publish frequently and you care about Bing, IndexNow is close to free and you should be using it. Set it up once, and every new page reaches Bing in minutes instead of days.

Given that Bing now feeds Copilot, DuckDuckGo and a share of the AI assistants people increasingly ask instead of searching, Bing indexing is worth considerably more attention than it was getting five years ago. That shift is real and most SEO effort has not caught up with it.

Bing's own URL submission allowance is far more generous than Google's, running to thousands of URLs a day for verified sites.

The three gaps

One: it only fires on change.

IndexNow is triggered by an event. You publish, it pings. You edit, it pings. You delete, it pings.

Now consider the page you published in March 2024. Nothing has happened to it since. It will never trigger IndexNow again as long as it exists. If Google or Bing drops it, IndexNow has no mechanism to notice or to argue.

For most established sites, the pages at risk are overwhelmingly the ones that have not changed. IndexNow is structurally blind to exactly that population.

Two: it does not cover the archive.

Install IndexNow today on a site with 8,000 existing pages, and it covers zero of them. It starts working from the moment you install it, forwards only. The archive, which is usually where the indexing gaps already are, is untouched.

Three: Google is not in the room.

Whatever share of your traffic Google represents, IndexNow contributes nothing to it.

Comparing the mechanisms honestly

Why we do not use IndexNow

Reasonable question, given we just called it good engineering.

Daily Indexing is not a change notification service. IndexNow answers "what just happened?" We answer a different question: "is every URL I own still in front of Google and Bing today?"

Those need different mechanisms. Adding IndexNow would let us list one more logo on the pricing page, and it would do nothing for the specific failure we exist to address, which is the page that quietly disappeared while nobody was looking at it.

If you want both, run IndexNow for instant coverage of new pages on Bing, and run daily submission underneath it for everything you have ever published. They are complementary, and we would rather say so than pretend one replaces the other.

For the wider picture, see how SEO indexing and discovery work, the difference between Google indexing and IndexNow, Google Indexing API eligibility, or compare daily sitemap monitoring and indexing-request plans.