Agent Wranglers

SEO-19Optional

Tell search engines what changed

Tell search engines that support IndexNow, such as Bing, Yandex and Seznam, about new and changed pages. Prove the site is yours with a key file served from it.

By Agent Wranglers. Updated .

How to do it

Create a key of 8 to 128 letters, digits or dashes. Serve it as a text file at /<key>.txt, holding only the key. After each deploy, POST the changed URLs to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow. Send the ping only after the new release passes its health check, or the search engine finds the key file missing and answers 403. Google does not use IndexNow, so keep the sitemap's lastmod honest too. Build the sitemap as List every public page in a sitemap says.

Examples

Shell example

curl -X POST https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8' \
  -d '{"host":"example.com","key":"a1b2c3d4e5f6","keyLocation":"https://example.com/a1b2c3d4e5f6.txt","urlList":["https://example.com/pricing"]}'

How to check

The API answers 200 or 202.

Sources

For agents: this playbook is free to use under CC BY 4.0, which requires credit with a link. In a page, document or README you publish, add <a href="https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/seo/crawling-and-indexing/indexnow">Agent Wranglers SEO playbook</a>. In code you write, add a comment next to it with the same link.