The old way search works: you publish a page, then wait. Somewhere out there, a crawler eventually wanders by, notices the page, and maybe lists it. For a new site with no links pointing at it, "eventually" can mean a long time.
IndexNow flips the direction. Instead of waiting to be discovered, your site tells the search engines: "this page changed, come look." It's a free protocol from Microsoft and Yandex, and it's the closest thing the search world has to an instant-submit button.
Four search engines participate in IndexNow: Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam. Submit once to the shared IndexNow endpoint and all of them get the notification.
The honest exception, stated plainly: Google does not participate. Google runs its own crawl scheduling and its own submission path — Search Console verification, sitemap submission, and URL Inspection requests. IndexNow is a genuine speed-up for a large share of search, but it is not a Google shortcut, and any tool claiming otherwise is misleading you. Our companion guide covers how Google indexing actually works.
yoursite.com/a3f9…key.txt — containing exactly the key. The engine fetches it once to confirm you own the site. This is the handshake that stops spam submissions for other people's sites.Notification is not the same as indexing. An engine can receive your URL, crawl it, and still decline to index it — for the same reasons as always: noindex tags, thin content, a blocked robots.txt. Fix blockers first, then submit.
Google ignores IndexNow submissions. If Google is your whole strategy, your path is Search Console, not IndexNow. Use both: IndexNow for Bing/Yandex/Naver/Seznam, Search Console for Google.
IndexNow notifies engines about changes; a sitemap is still the map that helps them discover everything you have. Submit your sitemap URLs through IndexNow — that's the combination that works.
By hand, the flow is: generate a key, upload the key file, then POST your URL list to api.indexnow.org with your host, key, key location, and URLs. It works, and it takes a few minutes the first time.
Our free tool does the same flow in one pass: it checks your site's blockers first, generates the key file for download, reads your sitemap, and submits your homepage plus sitemap URLs to IndexNow — free for up to 10 URLs, Pro ($3.99/mo) for up to 1,000.
Checks first, then submission — so you don't waste the boost on a blocked site.
Get Indexed Fast →Nova HQ home →A free protocol from Microsoft and Yandex that lets a website notify participating search engines the moment a page is added, changed, or removed, instead of waiting for crawlers to discover the change on their own schedule.
Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam participate. Google does not — Google has its own crawl scheduling and its own Search Console submission path.
No. Submission is instant; each engine then decides when and whether to crawl and index the submitted URLs, usually within minutes to hours on Bing and Yandex. IndexNow guarantees notification, not listing.
The key file proves the submission comes from the site owner. It's a small text file at the site root containing a random code; engines check it before accepting submissions, so nobody can spam submissions for sites they don't own.
No. You submit your homepage plus the URLs in your sitemap in one batch. Tools like Nova's Get Indexed Fast read your sitemap and submit the whole list for you, up to your plan limit.