IndexNow
IndexNow is an open protocol, created by Microsoft Bing and Yandex, that lets a website notify participating search engines the moment a page is added, updated, or removed, so the change is crawled within hours.
IndexNow is a push notification for search engines. Normally a crawler finds your new or changed page whenever it next visits, which on a small site can be days or weeks. With IndexNow, your site sends a simple request to the protocol's endpoint the moment a page changes, listing the URL, and participating engines fetch it promptly. A single ping is shared across all participating engines, so you notify once.
The protocol was introduced by Microsoft Bing and Yandex in 2021 and is supported by Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, and others. Google is not a participant; it has its own crawl scheduling and hasn't adopted IndexNow. So the protocol won't speed up Google indexing or affect AI Overviews. Ownership is verified with a key file: you publish a text file at your domain containing a key, and each ping references it so nobody can submit URLs for a site they don't control.
Why it matters for AI visibility comes down to Copilot and, indirectly, to any engine whose retrieval leans on Bing's index. Microsoft Copilot runs on Bing, so a page Bing indexes today is a page Copilot can cite today. Copilot is a small engine, roughly 1.1 to 1.5% of consumer web AI share and about 3.51% of AI referral traffic per Similarweb-family data, but it cites only about 2.5 domains per response according to Profound, so being indexed quickly on a fresh page matters more there than on engines with wider citation lists.
For a small business, IndexNow solves the lag problem for the engines it covers. You publish a page on emergency AC repair pricing in July because that's when people search for it. Without a ping, Bing may not see it until August. With one, it's in the index within hours, which means Copilot can retrieve it during the weeks it's most useful. It's a small mechanical advantage, free to use, and most small-business sites don't have it because their platform never implemented it.
Tibly-hosted sites send an IndexNow ping automatically every time a page is published, updated, or unpublished, batched per site, with the key file served on every domain Tibly hosts including custom domains. There's nothing to configure. Sites hosted elsewhere can add IndexNow through a plugin or their platform's settings if supported.
Keep exploring the glossary
- CrawlabilityCrawlability is how easily automated bots from search engines and AI companies can discover, fetch, and read the pages on a website, determined by robots.txt rules, server responses, HTTPS, sitemaps, and whether content is visible without running JavaScript.
- AI CrawlerAn AI crawler is an automated bot such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended that fetches web pages so an AI company can train its models or retrieve current information to answer user questions.
- Answer EngineAn answer engine is an AI system, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews, or Copilot, that responds to a question with a direct written answer naming a small number of options instead of a page of ranked links.
- AI-Readiness AuditAn AI-readiness audit is a check of a website that tests whether AI crawlers can reach it, whether it serves HTTPS, whether facts like pricing, hours, and service area appear in plain text, and whether basic structured data is present.
Common questions about IndexNow
- Does Google support IndexNow?
- No. Google has not adopted the protocol and relies on its own crawl scheduling, sitemaps, and Search Console. IndexNow speeds up indexing on Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, and other participants. For Google, keep your sitemap current and your internal links pointing at new pages.
- Does IndexNow help me appear in ChatGPT answers?
- Not directly. OpenAI runs its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and its own index, and doesn't participate in IndexNow. The engine IndexNow clearly helps with is Copilot, which runs on Bing's index. For ChatGPT, crawlability and clear content are what matter; the ping doesn't reach it.