Frequently asked questions

IndexNow is a protocol created by Microsoft Bing and Yandex that lets website owners instantly notify participating search engines when a page is added, updated, or deleted. Instead of waiting for a crawler to discover the change, your site pings the search engine directly. IndexSnap sends your URLs to IndexNow on your behalf, up to 10,000 URLs per request.

You can generate a free key at bing.com/indexnow/getstarted. After generating it, upload a text file named after your key (for example your-key.txt) containing only the key itself to the root of your website. Search engines check this file to confirm you control the site before accepting submissions.

Yes. Your IndexNow keys and Google Service Account credentials are stored only in your own browser's localStorage and are never stored on any IndexSnap server. Each submission request uses your key once to forward the request to the search engine and nothing is logged or kept. You can clear your saved data from your browser at any time.

A 200 or 202 response means the search engine accepted your submission request. It does not mean the page has been crawled or indexed yet. Indexing remains the search engine's decision, and it can take hours or days after a successful submission.

A 429 error means the request was rate limited. Microsoft may throttle IndexNow requests when too many are sent too quickly, or when traffic comes from a shared IP address that has sent a large volume of requests. If you see a 429, wait a while and try again, or submit from your own computer or network instead.

Use IndexNow to notify Bing and Yandex, and the Google Indexing API to notify Google. They cover different search engines, so many site owners use both. IndexNow works with a simple key file, while the Google Indexing API requires a Google Cloud Service Account and has a daily quota of 200 publish requests per project.

Google allows 200 publish requests per day per Google Cloud project. Each URL you submit counts toward that quota, so a large site may need more than one day to submit all its pages. Google also states the API is intended for short-lived pages such as job postings and livestreams.

In Google Cloud Console, create a project and a Service Account, then download its JSON key file. Enable the Indexing API for the project in the API Library, and add the service account's email address as an Owner of your property in Google Search Console. Then connect on IndexSnap's Google Indexing page using the one-click Google sign-in or by pasting your Service Account JSON.

No. Submitting a URL only notifies the search engine that the page exists or has changed. Whether and when the page is crawled, indexed, or ranked is entirely the search engine's decision. No tool can guarantee indexing or rankings.

There is no fixed time. After a successful submission, crawling and indexing can take anywhere from hours to days, and some pages may never be indexed if the search engine decides not to include them. Submitting a URL speeds up discovery, but it does not control the search engine's schedule.

No. You should only submit URLs for websites you own or are authorised to manage. For IndexNow, the search engine checks the key file at the site root to verify ownership, so submissions for sites you do not control will fail verification. For Google, the service account must be an Owner of the property in Search Console.

IndexSnap loads URLs from sitemap XML files, from pasted text, or from uploaded files. Make sure your sitemap URL is publicly reachable and returns valid XML with full URLs (for example https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). Pasted or uploaded URLs must be one per line, each a complete URL starting with http:// or https://, and must belong to the site you are submitting for.