IndexNow engines: who takes part, and who does not

Google does not participate

Google is not part of IndexNow. It does not receive submissions, no setting enables it, and no provider can arrange otherwise.

This is worth stating flatly because the assumption runs the other way. Anybody arriving at a page about faster discovery is usually thinking about one engine in particular, and a page that lets them read to the end without finding out has failed them. If your entire interest is reaching Google sooner, this protocol is not the mechanism, and knowing that now is worth more than any amount of detail about the mechanism itself.

What remains true is that the engines which do take part are meaningful for plenty of sites, and that the cost of participating is close to nothing once configured. Whether that trade is worth your attention depends entirely on where your readers search.

There is also no substitute to point you toward, which is worth saying rather than implying. Google discovers changes its own way, on its own schedule, and the tools it offers for asking are its own. Nothing in this protocol supplements them, and treating the two as alternatives to weigh against each other misreads what either is doing.

Who receives submissions by default

Two engines, with nothing to configure and nothing to switch on.

Bing and Yandex are the defaults; Seznam, Naver and Yep are switched on by you, engine by engine, when they match where your readers are. For a site with any meaningful audience reached through either, submission does what it says: a change is announced rather than waited for. What each of the two asks of you, and how to tell whether it matters to your readers, is set out under Bing and Yandex.

Both accept the same submission over HTTPS and verify it the same way, against the /<key>.txt file published on your own hostname. From your side there is nothing engine-specific to configure and no second key to place, which is the other reason these two are simply on rather than offered as a choice.

The reason this is the default rather than an option is that there is no downside to weigh. A submission carries no cost to you, no obligation, and no risk of being penalised for sending one. There is nothing to decide, so nothing is asked.

Who takes part when you enable them

Three more, deliberately not switched on for everybody.

Seznam, Naver, and Yep participate when you choose to include them. They stay off by default for one reason: relevance is regional or specialised, and for most sites submitting to an engine nobody in their audience uses is effort producing nothing.

The decision is therefore about your readers rather than about the engines. If a meaningful share of your audience is in a market one of them serves, enabling it is the same near-zero effort as the defaults. If not, leaving it off is not a missed opportunity; it is an accurate reflection of where your readers are.

The aggregator

One endpoint accepts a submission and passes it to participants, which changes the arithmetic of sending.

Rather than delivering the same announcement separately to each engine, a submission can go to a shared endpoint that distributes it, which is set out under the aggregator. What this changes is the number of outbound messages rather than what any engine receives: each participant ends up with the same announcement either way.

Its practical value is in reducing the moving parts. Fewer destinations means fewer places for a delivery to fail and fewer things to observe when something does. It does not add participants and does not reach anybody who was not already taking part.

Whether submissions go direct or through it is an implementation choice rather than something that changes your outcome. It is worth knowing about mainly so that seeing one endpoint where you expected several is not mistaken for a fault.

What this changes for a publisher

Less than the enthusiasm around it suggests, and more than nothing.

The honest description is narrow: for participating engines, a change can be learned about sooner than it would have been by ordinary revisiting. That is a real improvement for sites publishing frequently, and it is close to irrelevant for a site that changes twice a year.

What it does not change is anything about whether a page is worth indexing, how it ranks, or how it is treated once discovered. Those are the engine's decisions, made on its own criteria, and no announcement influences them. That separation is set out on how it works.

The reasonable expectation, then, is a modest improvement in timing on some engines and none on the largest, in exchange for a configuration you set up once. Whether that is worth doing is an easy question at that price and an impossible one if the price is believed to be higher than it is.

How this list is kept current

Read from the protocol’s own record, and dated.

Which engines take part is decided by the protocol, not by this page. The protocol’s own site, indexnow.org, publishes the list of participants and a submission endpoint for each; that list is the source for this section, and it was last read against these pages on 3 September 2026. Whether a participant is on by default, offered as an option, or not offered at all is a decision of the platform rather than a fact about the protocol, and the two are kept apart here on purpose.

When the list changes, this section changes with it, and the date above moves. A statement here is as current as that date and no more.

What this section covers

The pages below take each participant separately: the two engines that receive submissions by default and what each does with them, the question of Google and what to do instead, the three engines available on request and how to judge whether any of them matches your audience, and the shared endpoint that distributes a submission rather than adding anybody new.

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