Last October Microsoft Bing and Yandex introduced IndexNow, a simple way for websites to tell search engines that a page was added, changed or deleted. Instead of waiting for a crawler to notice, your site sends the addresses of those pages, and the search engine can visit them right away.

How it works:

  1. You choose a key, a random string of letters and numbers, and put it in a text file on your site. That file proves the submissions come from you.
  2. When pages change, your site sends their addresses with the key to a search engine that supports IndexNow, up to 10,000 at a time.
  3. The participating search engines share what they receive, so one submission reaches all of them.

Many content management systems and plugins are adding IndexNow support, so check yours before you build something yourself.

IndexNow does not replace your sitemap. It tells search engines what changed; your sitemap tells them which pages exist. Keep both.