How to Add IndexNow to WordPress, Wix, Cloudflare, or Any Site

What is IndexNow?

IndexNow is an open protocol for telling search engines that a URL has changed. Instead of waiting for a crawler to come back and notice, your site sends a short message listing the URLs that were added, updated, or deleted, and the participating search engines can recrawl them. The protocol's own site describes it as "an easy way for websites owners to instantly inform search engines" about content changes.

The search engines named as participants are Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex, and Yep. Google is not one of them, so IndexNow does nothing for Google Search.

Is IndexNow worth adding?

IndexNow is worth adding for almost any site, because on most platforms it takes one setting and costs nothing. The benefit is speed: Bing and the other participants learn about a change when it happens instead of whenever they next visit. That matters most for sites that publish or update often, and for the pages you most want seen quickly, like a new service or a corrected price.

Keep the expectation honest. Wix puts it well in its own help center: IndexNow "makes sure that search engines are aware of your site changes. However, it does not guarantee that the page will be crawled or indexed."

How do you add IndexNow on each platform?

On most platforms, adding IndexNow means turning on a setting that already exists. The table covers the common options, each checked against its publisher's documentation in September 2026.

Use one method, not several. If you run a WordPress SEO plugin that already sends IndexNow, you do not need Bing's plugin as well, and turning on Crawler Hints on top of both adds nothing but duplicate submissions.

If your platform is not listed, check its settings and app marketplace for IndexNow support, or add it by hand as described below. You can also submit individual URLs through Bing Webmaster Tools.

How do you add IndexNow to a custom site?

Adding IndexNow to a custom site takes three steps: create a key, host it, and send changed URLs. The protocol is small enough to add in an afternoon.

• Create a key: 8 to 128 characters of letters, numbers, and dashes. A random 32-character hex string works well.
• Host the key in a text file named after itself at your site's root, for example yoursite.com/your-key.txt, containing only the key.
• After content changes, POST the changed URLs as JSON to an IndexNow endpoint. One request can carry up to 10,000 URLs.

POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{
  "host": "www.example.com",
  "key": "your-key",
  "keyLocation": "https://www.example.com/your-key.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://www.example.com/services/new-service",
    "https://www.example.com/pricing"
  ]
}

A 200 response means the submission was accepted. A 202 means it was received and the key is still being validated. This site does it with a small command that reads the sitemap's last-modified dates, so each deploy submits only the pages that actually changed, and it refuses to submit development URLs by mistake.

What mistakes should you avoid?

• Submitting every URL on every deploy. The protocol recommends submitting URLs as content is added, updated, or deleted, so send what changed.
• A key file that does not match the key, or is not reachable, which makes submissions fail validation.
• Announcing staging or localhost URLs, which search engines cannot and should not crawl.
• Running two or three tools that all submit the same changes.
• Expecting it to help in Google. It does not; for Google, a current sitemap and good internal linking do that job.

Disclosure: I set this up as part of technical SEO work, so weigh the source. For most sites, though, the honest advice is the first row of the table that matches your platform: turn it on, then forget about it.