IndexNow protocol reference

IndexNow is a protocol for telling participating search engines that URLs on your site were added, updated or deleted. This page lists what its documentation says about the request formats, the key and the key file, and the responses, with the wording taken from the documentation page.

What the documentation says

Read on 2026-10-07. The documentation page showed no last-updated date. Notes under a quote are close paraphrases of the same page. This page covers only what that page documents: it does not list the participating search engines, and it says nothing about rankings.

Examples

The documentation's request for one URL. Replace the placeholders with the host name the search engine provides, the changed URL and your key.

https://<searchengine>/indexnow?url=url-changed&key=your-key

Its POST request for a set of URLs, with the optional keyLocation field from its option 2. The documentation leaves the key value blank in this example; YOUR-KEY is ours.

POST /indexnow HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Host: <searchengine>
{
  "host": "www.example.com",
  "key": "YOUR-KEY",
  "keyLocation": "https://www.example.com/myIndexNowKey63638.txt",
  "urlList": [
    "https://www.example.com/url1",
    "https://www.example.com/folder/url2",
    "https://www.example.com/url3"
  ]
}

Build a key, the key file and these requests with the free IndexNow generator. It only builds the request; you send it. For the sitemap side of discovery, see Google's documented sitemap rules and the XML sitemap validator.

Rules to remember

• The documentation says to use only the characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and dashes in a key, with 8 to 128 characters.
• It says the host must be proved by a key file, and strongly recommends the root of the host.
• It says a 200 response only means the search engine has received the URL.

How Google treats redirects and status codes: Google HTTP status codes guide.

Questions

Sources

• IndexNow documentation (indexnow.org), read on 2026-10-07