IndexNow Pings Bing, Not Google: What Each Actually Does
Two engines, two rules. Confusing them is why people ping the wrong service and wonder why Google never moved.
IndexNow is a genuinely useful protocol, and it is also the source of a common misunderstanding. It lets you notify search engines the moment a URL is created, changed, or deleted, instead of waiting for them to re-crawl. The catch people miss: IndexNow does not include Google.
Who honors IndexNow
Bing, Yandex, and Seznam participate, and they share submissions with each other. Ping one, and the URL is known to all of them quickly. For those engines it is real and worth doing — a free, immediate way to get new or changed pages discovered faster. To use it you host a key file at your domain and POST your URL list; the engines verify the key and accept the batch.
IndexNow is a fast lane. It just does not have an on-ramp to Google.
What Google actually accepts
Google is not on IndexNow, and in 2023 it retired the old sitemap ping endpoint entirely. Today Google discovers URLs by crawling your linked pages and reading the sitemap referenced in robots.txt or submitted in Search Console. There is a manual "Request indexing" button in the URL Inspection tool, but it is rate-limited to a handful of URLs per day and is meant for one-off fixes, not bulk submission.
The practical split
Think of it as two tracks. For Bing and friends: ping IndexNow whenever content changes — cheap and effective. For Google: keep a clean, accurate sitemap, make sure pages are linked and crawlable, and let quality earn the crawl. No amount of IndexNow pinging changes what Google indexes, because Google never receives the ping.
The takeaway
Use IndexNow — it genuinely helps on Bing, Yandex, and Seznam. Just do not expect it to move Google, and do not treat a successful IndexNow submission as proof Google will index anything. When Google is the target, the levers are a tidy sitemap and pages good enough to earn indexing, as covered in what "discovered, not indexed" really means.