Site Audit allows you to notify search engines about important content changes on your website using the IndexNow protocol. This article explains how to set up and use IndexNow within Site Audit.

IndexNow is a free protocol that allows website owners to inform search engines about the latest content updates, additions, or removals on their sites. By notifying search engines about these changes, you can ensure that they are aware of the updates instantly, rather than waiting for their bots to crawl and discover the changes themselves. IndexNow is currently supported by Bing, Yep, and other search engines. Learn more about IndexNow on the official website.

To use IndexNow, you need to prove website ownership by generating an API key and hosting a text file containing this key at the root of your website.

The API key should be between 8-128 characters long and can only contain letters (a-z, A-Z), numbers (0-9), and dashes (-). You need to create a UTF-8 text file at the root of your website with the API key as the file name and its content.

For example, if your API key is ab1405d3928e453188a66e13d632abb5, you should create a UTF-8 file at the following location: https://www.example.com/ab1405d3928e453188a66e13d632abb5.txt, and the file content should be ab1405d3928e453188a66e13d632abb5.

Once the key file is hosted, you can use this key to submit URLs to IndexNow. You can do this manually by sending HTTP requests to one of the IndexNow endpoints, as described in the official documentation. Alternatively, Site Audit can handle this process for you.

You can set up IndexNow in Site Audit by navigating to Project settings > Site Audit > Crawl settings, and then locating the IndexNow section.

If you don't have an API key, you can generate a new one directly in this section. However, don't forget to host the key file at the root of your website, as mentioned above. If you already have a key, simply paste it into the input box.

There are two ways to submit URLs to IndexNow via Site Audit:

After everything is set, don't forget to save the settings.

To submit multiple URLs in bulk, open Page Explorer, filter the URLs you want to submit, and click the "Submit to IndexNow" button. This will submit all the URLs in the current report to IndexNow.

To avoid wasting your crawl budget, we recommend ensuring that all submitted pages have relevant and positive changes. You can review the pages recommended for submission in the pre-configured "Pages to submit to IndexNow" issue. This issue automatically selects pages with content changes, as well as newly redirected or removed pages. You can also create your own custom issue with specific filter conditions or exclude certain pages from the report.

To submit an individual URL to IndexNow, open the URL details panel and click the "Submit to IndexNow" button.

After submitting the URLs, you'll receive a success notification. If there's an issue, such as a missing key file on your site, Site Audit will inform you about the error.

When auto-submission enabled in Project settings, Site Audit will automatically submit specified changes to IndexNow during each site crawl.

You can choose from four auto-submission options:

With auto-submission enabled, manual submission becomes unnecessary, and the "Pages to submit to IndexNow" issue will not be reported.

To track auto-submissions, four new fields have been added to Page Explorer.

These fields are:

By following these steps, you can efficiently notify search engines about important content changes on your website using the IndexNow protocol within Site Audit.