---
title: "IndexNow — monitoring glossary"
description: "IndexNow is an open protocol jointly developed by Microsoft and Yandex that lets websites instantly notify search engines when content is added, updated, or…"
canonical: "https://lemwatch.com/glossary/indexnow"
source: "https://lemwatch.com"
---

# IndexNow

> IndexNow is an open protocol jointly developed by Microsoft and Yandex that lets websites instantly notify search engines when content is added, updated, or deleted — replacing slow scheduled crawling with sub-second push notifications.

## Definition

 Submission is a single HTTP POST containing the changed URLs and a public key file hosted on the domain (proving ownership). One submission propagates to all participating engines: Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, and others. Google does not currently participate but Bing's adoption alone justifies the integration.

 A typical postdeploy hook submits the full sitemap on every release, plus targeted notifications for high-priority pages (changelog posts, new comparison pages) as they go live.

## Why it matters

 Bing indexation can drop from 7 days to under 5 minutes. For sites that publish frequently — changelog posts, news, programmatic SEO pages — IndexNow is the single biggest free win available in 2026.

 See it in the product: [SEO monitoring](https://lemwatch.com/features).


## Related

- [Monitoring glossary](https://lemwatch.com/glossary)
- [Sitemap](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/sitemap)
- [Indexing](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/indexing)
- [SEO](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/seo)
- [Schema Markup](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/schema-markup)
- [SSL/TLS](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/ssl)
- [All monitoring checks](https://lemwatch.com/features)
- [INP (Interaction to Next Paint)](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/inp)