A quiet background web service called IndexNow has seen remarkable expansion in two years, with 60 million websites added each day and handling daily submissions of 1.4 billion URLs. The initiative is designed to speed updates to search engines, and is already used by Bing and Yandex.
Search engines typically aren’t aware of the exact moment any website’s content is updated, and as we know, they continuously scan the internet looking for anything new. This can use up a significant amount of a website’s bandwidth and there’s no guarantee they’ll reach the new stuff. ‘XML Sitemaps’ help a lot, but aren’t perfect. The search engines still have to come to us to see if there’ve been any changes.
IndexNow directly tackles this problem by alerting search engines with a simple notification whenever a URL is added, changed, or removed. Setting up IndexNow is an easy process, but many sites have it built into their CMS anyway (including through popular SEO plugins for WordPress).