How to Implement IndexNow

We're proud to announce Milestone's Partnership with IndexNow. This Partnership enables faster indexing for all our clients on CMS and Schema Manager, ensuring all content updates/changes are submitted for indexing immediately on popular search engines like Bing and Yandex, which is used as sources of information by top LLMs. 

In this article, we'll show you how to generate your API key, which will be used to configure IndexNow to Schema Manager. 

What is IndexNow?

IndexNow is an open-source protocol supported by major search engines like Bing and Yandex. It enables websites to instantly notify search engines when content is added, updated, or deleted, drastically reducing the time it takes for changes to appear in search results.

Why Use IndexNow?

• Ensure your latest updates are indexed faster
• Improve visibility and search performance
• Reduce crawl delays and increase efficiency 

Step-by-Step: Implement IndexNow

1. Create a Bing Webmaster Tools account and ‘Add & verify’ your site

To generate your API key, you'd first need to create an account for Bing Webmaster Tools. Following which, you'd need to verify your site. To do so, follow the steps here: Add & Verify Your Site

2. Generate Your API Key

An API key validates that submitted URLs belong to your domain. 

Example Key:

Refer to the process here: Bing Implementation

3. Host the API Key File

Here's the option for hosting the key. 

Host a UTF-8 .txt file named with the API key at the root of your website.

Example:

The file should contain only this line (your key):

4. Submit URLs to IndexNow

The URLs will automatically be submitted from Schema Manager. 

5. Verify Submission

Use Bing Webmaster Tools to confirm that your URLs have been received and indexed. You'd have to create an account to verify the submission via IndexNow. 

The onboarding team will use the generated API key to activate IndexNow on Schema Manager.