IndexNow and backlinks

What IndexNow is

IndexNow is a push protocol: a website sends a short HTTP request to a participating search engine listing URLs that were added, updated, redirected or deleted. The engine can then crawl those URLs sooner instead of waiting to rediscover them. A submission sent to any one endpoint is shared with every participating engine, so a single request reaches the whole group.

The protocol is free, documented at indexnow.org, and built into many CMS platforms and CDNs. WordPress plugins, Shopify, Wix and Cloudflare all offer native or add-on support, according to the IndexNow FAQ.

Who participates

The protocol's published engine list currently names:

Google is absent from that list and from the endpoint list in the FAQ. Notifications sent through IndexNow therefore never reach Googlebot's scheduler. For most link builders, whose concern is Google rankings, this alone settles the question.

Google retired a related mechanism of its own in 2023: the unauthenticated sitemap "ping" endpoint. Its announcement said "the vast majority of the submissions lead to spam" and that pings would return 404 once the endpoint was removed. Google's supported discovery routes for owned sites remain sitemaps, robots.txt sitemap references and Search Console.

How submission and verification work

A site owner generates a key of 8 to 128 characters (letters, numbers and hyphens), saves it in a UTF-8 text file named after the key, and serves it from the site, for example https://example.com/{key}.txt. Each submission includes the key, and the engine fetches the file to confirm the submitter controls the host. A first request may return HTTP 202 while the key is verified; later accepted requests return HTTP 200.

Bulk submissions use a JSON POST of up to 10,000 URLs:

POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow
{ "host": "www.example.com", "key": "...", "urlList": ["https://www.example.com/a"] }

The FAQ adds that submitted URLs count toward the site's crawl quota and asks owners to wait at least five minutes before resubmitting the same URL.

Why it rarely applies to backlinks

The key file is the obstacle. Your backlink sits on a page hosted by another publisher. To submit that page through IndexNow you would need to place a file on their server, which only the publisher can do. A request using your own key for their URL fails verification because the key is checked on the host of the submitted URL.

There are narrow cases where it does apply:

• You own both sites. A link from your own blog to your own store can be announced through IndexNow on the blog's host.
• The publisher's CMS already pings. Many WordPress and Shopify sites submit new posts automatically, so a fresh guest post may already be announced to Bing without anyone asking.
• Non-Google markets. In regions where Yandex, Naver or Seznam carry real traffic, getting the linking page into those indexes has value of its own.

IndexNow compared with other submission channels

The middle rows are explained in the Indexing API and backlinks and URL Inspection limits. The last row is the subject of what a backlink indexer is, with its mechanics described in how backlink indexers work.

Practical advice

For your own sites, enabling IndexNow is low effort and harmless; it keeps Bing and the other participants current. It should sit alongside an XML sitemap, which the protocol's own FAQ recommends for complete coverage. For links on sites you do not control, neither IndexNow nor any Google first-party tool will reach the page, so verification and resubmission happen through third-party tools. IndexChex, the publisher of this wiki, is one such tool, and like the others it targets Google rather than the IndexNow group.