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§ 6.0.15 ARTICLE
Published VerifiedEvery 6 weeks Sources2 named Authored bySquareRank Team

Glossary · § 6.0.15 · Defined term

IndexNow

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets websites instantly notify participating search engines — Bing, Yandex, and a handful of smaller engines — when a URL has been added, updated, or deleted1. Google has not adopted IndexNow; the protocol is Bing-aligned in practice. Microsoft and Yandex announced the protocol jointly in October 2021.

For a Squarespace owner the question is binary: do you care about Bing visibility (and by extension Bing Copilot, ChatGPT's Bing-backed search index)? If yes, IndexNow is worth setting up. If your traffic is overwhelmingly Google, IndexNow is a low-priority install.

Definition

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets websites instantly notify participating search engines — Bing, Yandex, and a handful of smaller engines — when a URL has been added, updated, or deleted. Google has not adopted IndexNow; the protocol is Bing-aligned in practice.

The protocol is intentionally simple: a publisher hosts a small text file at a known URL containing an API key, then submits URL changes via a GET request to an IndexNow endpoint with the key and the changed URL. The receiving engine verifies the key by fetching the publisher's text file, then proceeds to crawl or remove the submitted URL.

How IndexNow works

Four steps. (1) Generate an API key (any random string, 8-128 characters). (2) Publish a file at /[key].txt on your site containing only the key. (3) Submit URL changes via GET to https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow?url=...&key=... (4) The engine fetches your key file to verify ownership, then crawls or removes the URL.

The protocol supports single-URL submission and bulk submission (up to 10,000 URLs per request via POST). Most publishers integrate IndexNow into their CMS publish pipeline so submission happens automatically on publish. For Squarespace owners without CMS-level access, manual submission via Bing Webmaster Tools is the practical path2.

Why Google hasn't adopted IndexNow

Google announced in November 2021 that it would 'test' IndexNow but has not adopted the protocol as of May 2026. Google's stated reasoning emphasises sustainability concerns about ping-style protocols and the lack of clear benefit when their crawler already discovers updates within minutes for important sites. Industry speculation adds: Google has its own URL-Inspection-tool submission flow and prefers not to depend on a Microsoft-led standard.

Practical implication: IndexNow's value scales with Bing-side traffic. For a Squarespace site whose Google-to-Bing traffic ratio is 95:5 (typical for most niches outside enterprise tech), IndexNow's upside is small. For a site with meaningful Bing traffic (or one that wants to be cited in ChatGPT, which uses Bing's index), the upside is real but modest.

IndexNow on Squarespace specifically

Squarespace does not natively integrate IndexNow. The practical Squarespace path: submit URL changes manually through Bing Webmaster Tools, which has an IndexNow tab that accepts up to 10,000 URLs per submission. For most Squarespace sites this is a once-per-quarter operation when major content updates ship; high-publishing-frequency sites may want a more automated approach via a Zapier integration with the IndexNow API.

The install pattern: (1) verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools; (2) generate an IndexNow API key in the tool; (3) host the key file on Squarespace via the same URL-Mappings-and-page workaround used for llms.txt (create a Squarespace page at /{key}-txt, redirect /{key}.txt to it); (4) submit URL changes manually from the Bing console when needed. The full install detail lives at Squarespace IndexNow install.

IndexNow sits inside the Bing cluster.

Keep reading · § 6.0.15