AI SEO Glossary
What is IndexNow?
Ask AI for a business like yours. Are you in the answer?
ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity only recommend sites they can read — and most can't read yours. Scan it free and see exactly where you stand.
Free · no signup · scores the 9 signals AI uses to find you · ~20 seconds
TL;DR — IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website notify participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated, or deleted, instead of waiting for the next crawl. A site submits changed URLs to a single endpoint with a verification key, and participating engines — Microsoft Bing and Yandex most prominently — share the notifications. For AI visibility the Bing connection is the point: Bing's index feeds Microsoft Copilot and is a retrieval source for ChatGPT, so IndexNow shortens the path from publishing a page to that page being retrievable in AI answers.
Definition & scope
IndexNow complements rather than replaces sitemaps: the sitemap remains the full inventory; IndexNow is the change signal. Google does not participate — Googlebot discovery still runs through sitemaps, internal links, and crawl scheduling.
For large catalogs, IndexNow is also a crawl-efficiency tool: engines that know exactly which URLs changed spend less of a site's crawl budget re-fetching pages that didn't.
Related terms
- Crawl Budget — IndexNow reduces wasted recrawling.
- AI Crawler — faster indexation feeds AI retrieval sooner.
Related services
- eCommerce SEO Agency — indexation management for large catalogs.
- eCommerce SEO Audit — finds indexation gaps IndexNow can close.
Stop arguing about acronyms. Optimize for every engine.
We bundle classic SEO, AEO, and GEO into one campaign — citation share measured weekly across 10+ engines via our WorkspaceCRM. 888-982-8269.