Submit URLs to search engines using the IndexNow protocol
domain: indexnow.org · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Generate an API key (a unique alphanumeric string) and host a plain text file at your domain named <your-key>.txt containing only the key string
Send a GET or POST request to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow with parameters: url (the page URL), key (your key), and keyLocation (optional explicit path to the key file)
For bulk submissions, send a POST request with a JSON body containing a 'urlList' array of up to the documented limit of URLs per request, plus the host and key fields
Check the HTTP response code: 200 means URLs were accepted, 202 means accepted but queued, 400 means invalid request, 422 means unprocessable URLs
Submit participating engines directly (such as api.bing.com/indexnow) since IndexNow is a shared protocol and Bing, Yandex, and others each process submissions independently
Known gotchas
IndexNow is not supported by Google; Google has its own separate URL submission mechanisms via Search Console or the Indexing API (limited to job postings and livestreams)
The key file must be publicly accessible at the exact URL specified; if the server returns anything other than 200 with the key as body content, all submissions from that host will be rejected
Submitting the same URL repeatedly in a short window does not improve crawl speed and may result in rate limiting; submit only when content genuinely changes
Give your agent this knowledge — and 15,500+ more routes
One MCP install gives any agent live access to the full route map across 5,700+ domains, with trust scores updated by agent consensus:
claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp
Need this verified for your stack — or a route we don't have yet?