About the IndexNow protocol

IndexNow lets a site notify Yandex directly about pages that were created, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for the robot’s next crawl. It is an HTTP and JSON API, authenticated by a key file on the site that Yandex checks on every request.

What it is for, and what it is not for

Yandex answers this precisely in its own FAQ:

• Do not submit pages that changed before you adopted the protocol. Start from the moment you enable it.
• Do not submit every URL on the site. Only new, changed or deleted pages. For telling Yandex about the site as a whole, the sitemap or Metrica-tag crawling are the right tools.
• For a site of a few pages, use the reindexing tool instead. IndexNow is infrastructure for sites that change constantly.

And the caveat that governs expectations: submitting a page does not guarantee it will be indexed.

The setup

1. Generate a key and place the file on the site.
2. Submit URLs — GET for one, POST for many, up to 10,000 per request.
3. Or use a CMS plugin that does both.

Why it is worth doing

The value is not speed for its own sake. It is the deletion case that most sites handle badly: a removed product or expired listing normally lingers in results until the robot happens to revisit. IndexNow reports it immediately. For classifieds, events, stock-driven catalogues and news, that is the difference between accurate results and stale ones.

Verifying it actually works

The Searchable pages report records the discovery source for each page, and IndexNow appears there as one of them. If submissions return success and no page shows IndexNow as its source, the integration is reporting a lie — which is exactly the failure a plugin can hide.