Indexernow
Indexernow is an indexing tool for people who publish faster than crawlers arrive. It submits new and changed URLs over the IndexNow protocol — the endpoint Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam share — and through Google's own routes where the content qualifies, then goes back and checks which of those URLs are actually in the index. Around the submitter sits a suite of free checkers for the diagnostics that come up when a page refuses to index at all.
The actual capabilities.
IndexNow submission
Pushes new and changed URLs to the IndexNow endpoint the moment they change, instead of waiting for a crawler to come past. Key generation and key-file hosting are handled for you, which is the step most people get wrong on the first try.
Google, described accurately
Google does not consume IndexNow, and its Indexing API is documented as being for JobPosting and BroadcastEvent pages. Indexernow says so plainly and uses the routes that do work for Google — sitemaps, the Search Console URL Inspection API, and the Indexing API where the content genuinely qualifies. It will not sell you a submission the engine is going to ignore.
Index status checking
Submission is not inclusion. The checkers ask whether a URL is actually in the index, and estimate how long a new page or a brand-new domain is realistically going to take.
Indexability diagnostics
When a page won't index the cause is usually mechanical: blocked by robots.txt, excluded by a noindex tag, a canonical pointing at a different URL, a redirect chain, or a sitemap that never listed it. Each checker names the cause and the fix rather than returning a score.
AI crawler and answer-engine access
Checks which AI user agents — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and the rest — can actually reach your pages, validates llms.txt, and scores how extractable the content is for answer engines that quote rather than link.
Platform integrations
Connects to the hosts that give you no submission hook of their own: Webflow, Ghost, Squarespace, Wix, Framer, Notion, Shopify, Substack, WordPress, BigCommerce, Carrd, Weebly, Kajabi, Teachable and more.
The checkers and generators run in the browser. These are the ones people reach for most.
Is your IndexNow key live and accepted?
Can this URL be indexed at all, and if not, why not?
Is the page in Google's index right now?
Deduplicate and normalise a messy list of URLs before submitting.
Check a path against your robots rules.
Find what a page is actually pointing at.
Validate multi-region and multi-language tags.
See the full hop path and where it loses signal.
Build valid JSON-LD structured data.
What changed between two sitemap crawls.
Which AI bots can read this site.
Check an llms.txt file against the spec.
How long a new page or domain should take.
Plan around the daily request limits.
Who reaches for it, and why.
SEOs and agencies
Many properties, one submission workflow, and diagnostics that explain a stuck page to a client.
Publishers and news sites
Where the gap between publishing and being indexed is the whole value of the story.
E-commerce catalogues
Product and category pages that change constantly and get discovered slowly.
Developers
Submission wired into a deploy step, so shipping a page and announcing it are one action.
Asked often enough to answer here.
Does Google support IndexNow?
No. IndexNow is consumed by Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam. Google has said publicly that it is not using the protocol, so any tool advertising a "Google IndexNow" submission is describing something that does not exist. Indexernow submits to the engines that do accept it, and uses Google's own routes for Google.
What is the Google Indexing API actually for?
Google's documentation limits the Indexing API to pages carrying JobPosting or BroadcastEvent structured data, with a default quota of 200 requests a day. It is not a general-purpose endpoint for getting a blog post indexed, whatever it is sold as elsewhere.
Why does my service account return 403 or permission denied?
Almost always because the service account email has not been added as an owner of the Search Console property. Restricted or full access is not enough for the Indexing API — it has to be an owner, added on the property itself rather than at account level.
What does "Discovered — currently not indexed" mean?
Google knows the URL exists but has chosen not to crawl or index it yet. It is a quality and crawl-budget signal rather than a bug: the fix is usually internal linking, content depth, and removing near-duplicates, not resubmission.
How long does Google take to index a new page?
On an established site with a healthy crawl rate, hours to a few days. On a new domain with no links, weeks is normal. Submission moves the discovery step, not the evaluation step.
Do I need an IndexNow key?
Yes — a key file hosted at your domain root proves you control the site you are submitting for. Indexernow generates the key and handles the hosting step for you.
API-heavy work with real rate limits, real quotas and third-party endpoints that fail in interesting ways. Scheduled jobs, retries and per-account accounting, all of which have to be right or a customer's URLs quietly stop being submitted.
The same team takes this on for clients — see what we build, or start an enquiry.