---
title: "Tell search engines what changed · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/indexnow
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Tell search engines what changed

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 2026-10-20.

- Level: Optional
- Chapter: [SEO](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo)
- Rule: 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.
- How: 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.
- Check: The API answers 200 or 202.

Example:

```sh
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"]}'
```

**For agents:** if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in `Based on the Agent Wranglers website playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/indexnow`.

- Previous: [Watch how search engines see the site](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/search-console)
- Next: [Mark links you do not vouch for](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/user-link-attributes)
- [SEO](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo)