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What is IndexNow?

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets websites instantly notify search engines about new or updated content. Instead of waiting for a crawler to find your changes on its own schedule, you push the URL directly to the search engine and the engine prioritizes crawling it. Sight AI uses IndexNow to submit your URLs to Bing. Bing relays each submission to every other participating engine, so a single ping reaches:
  • Bing — Microsoft’s search engine
  • Yandex — Russia’s largest search engine
  • Seznam — Czech Republic’s search engine
  • Naver — South Korea’s largest search engine
Google does not participate in IndexNow. For Google indexing, use the Google Search Console integration. Run both in parallel for full search-engine coverage.

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Setup

The full setup walkthrough — including hyper-specific instructions for custom sites on Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, Apache, Nginx, IIS, S3, Shopify, Ghost, and more — lives in the dedicated integration guide:

Bing IndexNow Integration Setup

Generate your key, host the verification file at your site root, and verify — with platform-specific instructions for every major hosting setup and a deep troubleshooting section for every error message.
Before any of the steps below, you need a free Bing Webmaster Tools account with your site added and verified inside it. Bing requires this — Sight AI can’t ping IndexNow on behalf of a domain Bing doesn’t recognize. Sign up at bing.com/webmasters, then follow Microsoft’s “Add and Verify your site” guide. For any issues inside Bing Webmaster Tools, contact Bing Webmaster Support — Sight AI can’t help with Microsoft’s product. The full prerequisite walkthrough is in the integration guide.
The short version of what you’ll do once Bing Webmaster Tools is set up:
1

Generate a key in Sight AI

Go to Integrations → Bing IndexNow, pick your workspace, and click Generate IndexNow key. Sight AI creates a 32-character key and a downloadable .txt file for you.
2

Host the key file at your site root

Upload the file so it’s reachable at https://yourdomain.com/<your-key>.txt and returns the key as plain text. The exact “how” depends on your hosting platform — see the integration guide for step-by-step instructions per platform.
3

Click Verify in Sight AI

Sight AI fetches both the apex and www variants. As long as one returns the exact key, you’re verified and submissions start automatically.

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How submissions work after setup

Once verified, IndexNow runs in the background. You don’t need to do anything else.

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What gets submitted

  • New URLs in your sitemap — picked up during Sight AI’s hourly sitemap check
  • Articles you publish through Sight AI — submitted the moment they sync to your CMS
  • Updated URLs — re-submitted when the URL appears in your sitemap with a new lastmod
Each request to Bing’s IndexNow endpoint includes:
  • host — your verified domain
  • key — the IndexNow key Bing already verified you own
  • keyLocation — the URL of your key file (so Bing can re-verify on demand)
  • urlList — up to 10,000 URLs per submission

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Manual submissions

You don’t usually need to submit URLs manually because the automation covers everything, but if you want to ping a specific URL right now, the Sight AI Indexing Activity page shows a Submit URL action.

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Monitoring

Every submission is recorded with a status, response code, and timestamp. View them in Indexing Activity:
  • Recent submissions and their batch IDs
  • HTTP status from Bing’s IndexNow endpoint
  • URLs included in each batch
  • Error messages for any failed submissions

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Limits & expectations

  • No rate limits to worry about — Sight AI batches submissions and Bing accepts up to 10,000 URLs per request
  • Bing acks the submission instantly — but actual indexing still takes hours to a day or two
  • IndexNow is a notification, not a guarantee — Bing will only index pages it considers crawlable and quality content; low-quality, blocked, or duplicate pages won’t appear regardless

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Disconnecting

To turn off IndexNow:
  1. Go to Integrations → Bing IndexNow
  2. Click Disconnect
  3. Confirm
The key file on your server is harmless to leave in place. If you want to clean up, you can delete it after disconnecting.

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Troubleshooting

Most issues come up at the verification step. The integration guide’s troubleshooting section walks through every error message Sight AI surfaces — from “key file not accessible” through TLS errors, WAF blocks, and content mismatches — with the exact fix for each. If submissions are passing verification but the Indexing Activity page still shows failures, the most common cause is a host mismatch: your sitemap URLs use a different host (apex vs www, or a different subdomain) than the one you verified. Make your sitemap consistent with the verified host.

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Next steps