Setup

IndexNow is included automatically; no account, API key or scheduled workflow is needed. Set SITE_URL to your actual public HTTPS origin (for example, https://your-product.com). Normal startup creates a random per-origin key in Postgres and serves /<key>.txt as plain text. Local HTTP, IP addresses and reserved development domains do not submit. Set INDEXNOW_ENABLED=false on public staging/preview deployments or to opt out. Keep SITE_URL canonical.

What gets submitted

After startup, a background worker checks that the public key endpoint is serving this build, then notifies IndexNow about the homepage and enabled, published blog/docs pages. Drafts and account/auth/billing URLs are excluded. App source, assets, content or feature changes notify the current public page set; removed pages are also submitted from the previous accepted snapshot. This deliberately sends all public pages when the build fingerprint changes, not just pages with a changed publication date. Unchanged restarts send nothing.

Reliability

The worker retries errors with backoff (up to one hour), checks every 15 minutes after success, and only advances its durable snapshot after every batch is accepted. Replica row locks prevent simultaneous submissions. A crash after acceptance but before saving can repeat a batch safely. Keep the Postgres database across deploys; deleting its state loses removal history.

Public ownership endpoints must be accessible without authentication, redirects or proxy caching, including the x-indexnow-revision header. The fingerprint works without Git or a particular hosting provider. Rolling deployments may delay notifications until the public endpoint matches the worker's build.

Extending public content

For new public route types, extend indexnow_paths and the sitemap together. Content here is embedded at build time: publish edits by rebuilding/deploying. Future database-backed content needs a publish/update/delete integration; the startup snapshot does not watch arbitrary database rows.

Verify submissions

Successful submission logs IndexNow URLs accepted; HTTP 200 means received and 202 means received with ownership validation pending. Neither guarantees crawling, indexing or ranking. IndexNow complements the sitemap; it does not replace Google Search Console. See the IndexNow protocol.