What is IndexNow? A Complete Guide

IndexNow is an open protocol developed by Microsoft (Bing) and Yandex that allows website owners to instantly notify participating search engines when content is added, updated, or deleted. Instead of waiting days or weeks for a search engine’s crawler to discover changes, IndexNow delivers that information in near-real-time.

The Problem IndexNow Solves

Traditional web crawling is reactive: search engines discover changes by periodically crawling your site on their own schedule. For e-commerce stores, this means:

• New products may take days to be indexed
• Price updates and stock changes are reflected slowly in search results
• Deleted pages may continue appearing in search results for extended periods
• Crawl budget is wasted on unchanged pages

IndexNow inverts this model. Your server tells the search engine what changed, when it changed, and what the URL is — right when the change happens.

How IndexNow Works — Step by Step

1. Verification: You generate an API key and place it as a text file at your domain root (e.g., yourstore.com/{key}.txt). This proves you own the domain. This extension handles this automatically during the first cron run.
2. Queue: When you add, edit, or delete a product in OpenCart, the event hooks in this extension add the URL to a queue in the database.
3. Submit: A scheduled cron job picks up queued URLs (up to 100 at a time), groups them by store and language, and sends a batch API request to the IndexNow endpoint.
4. Propagation: The receiving search engine (typically Bing) processes the notification and shares it with other IndexNow participants. They re-crawl or update their index accordingly.

Who Uses IndexNow?

Will Google Adopt IndexNow?

This is a common question. Google has not joined IndexNow as of early 2026, but has made public statements acknowledging the protocol and has not ruled out future participation.

Reasons often cited for Google’s hesitation:

• Scale — Google indexes hundreds of billions of pages; a push-based system at that scale presents different infrastructure challenges than Bing faces
• Spam risk — Any open protocol can be abused by spammers submitting low-quality pages
• Control — Crawling on its own schedule gives Google more control over quality signals

Why adoption is still likely eventually:

• The protocol is open source and has broad industry support
• Google has participated in standards discussions at the W3C/Web Standards community
• The direction of the web is toward real-time data
• Many SEOs believe adoption is a question of when, not if

💡 Bottom line: Enable IndexNow today. It immediately benefits your Bing and Yandex ranking freshness, reduces crawl lag, and positions your store to benefit if and when Google adopts the protocol.

IndexNow API Response Codes

IndexNow vs. XML Sitemap — What’s the Difference?

Use both. They serve complementary purposes.