IndexNow

Search engines find out about a new or changed page when they next crawl your site, which can take days. IndexNow lets the site tell them straight away. One notification reaches every search engine taking part, because they share what they receive: Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and others.

Google does not take part. It keeps finding changes through your sitemap, which the extension already keeps up to date, so nothing changes for Google either way.

Turning it on

SEO → Sitemap → IndexNow → Send new and updated pages. That is all: no account to create and no key to copy from anywhere.

The site proves the notifications come from its owner with a key file. When the feature is first used, it makes a random key and serves it as a small text file at https://your-site/<key>.txt. The search engine fetches that file to check. The box shows the address so you can open it.

What is sent

• A post, page or other public content type when it is published, and every time it is updated while published.
• Not drafts, private posts, autosaves or revisions, and nothing from a content type the SEO extension does not cover.
• Not a page you take down. By the time it is unpublished WordPress has already changed its address, so the search engine finds out on its next visit.

Notifications are sent after the page has saved, without waiting for a reply, so saving is never slower. The same address is not sent again within ten minutes, so a burst of saves sends once. The box lists the last ten addresses sent.

Limits

• Nothing is sent while Settings → Reading asks search engines not to index the site.
• A local test site cannot be reached by the search engine, so its notifications are ignored.
• IndexNow is a hint to crawl the page sooner. It does not make a page rank, and it does not make a search engine index a page it would otherwise skip.
• Switching it off stops both the notifications and the key file.