Does IndexNow Work? What Bing Did With Our 58 URLs
Does IndexNow work? Bing checked our key within a second, then fetched 1 of 51 pages we sent, via a tagged link, in 24 hours. Our server log and the docs.
By Tyler Phan7 min readLast reviewed
Part of our guide to technical SEO
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At 13:19 Vietnam time on October 20, 2026, our deploy script sent every URL in elmrank.com's sitemap, 58 of them, to IndexNow. Bing's crawler fetched our key file one second after our script had checked it. Then we read our server log for the next 24 hours to answer one question: does IndexNow work for a new site?
Bingbot, counted only from Bing's published IP ranges, requested 1 of the 51 URLs we can attribute to our site: /start, 3 times. Each request carried a ?from= tag from one of our contact buttons (/start?from=about, for example), so Bingbot was following links on our pages, not the bare /start we had sent. It had been to us before. On October 17 one Bing address fetched /start?from=nav and, within the same two seconds, /about, /pricing and /services, which were almost certainly ours too; on October 19 it took /start?from=hero. In the 24 hours after the submission it also made 2,960 requests for pages that only the other sites on our server have.
Two replies in a 2025 r/bigseo thread about a site Bing wouldn't index give both sides. u/WebLinkr (1 point): "Actually - bing has indexnow and is the easiest to get indexed for". u/saltedjellyfish (1 point), about a locksmith client whose site Bing had dropped: "He has Indexnow via his Wix studio site and it doesn't make any difference to bing." Our first day sides with the second reply, for a new site.
What we sent and what came back
- 106:19:56 UTCOur script checks that the key file loads
- 206:19:57 UTCBingbot fetches the key file
- 306:19:58 UTCIndexNow answers 202 to our 58 URLs
- 4Next 24 hoursBingbot: 3 requests, all for /start?from=…
Our deploy script, scripts/deploy-vps.sh, sends IndexNow every URL that is new in the sitemap or has a new last-modified date after each deploy. On the first run it had no earlier deploy to compare with, so it sent the whole sitemap. The IndexNow FAQ allows that for a site that is new as a whole: IndexNow "is not designed for submitting every URL on your site at once. If your entire site has been recently updated, such as after a migration or redesign, it is acceptable to submit all URLs using IndexNow. For ongoing discovery and long-term indexing, use an XML sitemap." Ours was six days old. The FAQ also says not to submit pages that changed before you started using IndexNow. We'd still expect a crawl of a few new posts out of 58. Every later deploy has sent only what changed, two or three URLs at a time.
The 202 is normal for a first submission. The IndexNow FAQ says it "means the URL was received, and the search engine will verify your key before indexing the content," and later submissions "will typically return HTTP 200." Ours did: all four later submissions got 200, and no crawler fetched the key file again.
IndexNow sends one submission to every participating engine. On October 21, indexnow.org listed Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, the Internet Archive and Amazon. Google isn't on the list.
What Bing crawled in the next 24 hours
Our server hosts several sites, and its log doesn't record which site a request was for. Seven of the 58 URLs (/, /blog, /about, /pricing, /services, /terms and /privacy) exist on other sites too, so we left them out. That leaves 51 URLs that only elmrank.com serves: 3 service pages, 6 blog category pages, 3 other pages (/use-cases, /sample-report and /start) and 39 posts. So "1 of 51" below is a floor: Bing may also have fetched some of our seven shared pages, and we can't tell.
| Crawler | 13 days before (Oct 7 to 20) | 24 hours after |
|---|---|---|
| Bingbot | 2 requests, 1 URL (/start) | 3 requests, 1 URL (/start) |
| Googlebot | 95 requests, 49 URLs | 3 requests, 3 URLs |
| Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, Amazon, Internet Archive | 0 | 0 |
Bingbot and Googlebot are counted only when the request came from the company's published IP ranges. The others are counted by user agent, and none of them requested any of our 51 URLs.
After the submission, Bingbot came to one of our pages. It fetched /start three times, the first 49 minutes after the submission, each time with a ?from= tag, and left the other 50 alone, including 39 posts that had been live for between one hour and six days. Googlebot's 3 requests are low because Google had already fetched 49 of the 51 pages in the days before. It had our sitemap, and we ask for indexing of every new page in Search Console with Request Indexing. Across our whole log, from October 7 to the end of the test, Googlebot fetched all 54 URLs we have sent to IndexNow that only our site serves, and Bingbot fetched one.
Bing wasn't blocked. In the same 24 hours, Bingbot made 3,053 requests to the server from its published ranges: 2,960 for pages only the other sites have, 90 for robots.txt, sitemaps and the shared paths, and our 3. Our robots.txt allows every crawler on everything but /lab.
New pages sent one at a time
The cleaner test is a single new page, sent when it goes live. Our cron job published the post on getting cited by Perplexity at 14:00 on October 20, and the deploy sent it to IndexNow at 14:01. Google gets no IndexNow ping, but that afternoon we asked for the post in Search Console with Request Indexing, as we do for every new post, and Googlebot fetched it during that run, 97 minutes after it was sent. Bingbot still hadn't fetched it 23 hours later. We also edited /services/technical-seo and sent it at 15:09. Bingbot, which had never fetched that page, still hadn't 22 hours later, and Googlebot hadn't come back to it either.
The same happened twice on October 21. Our posts on how long Google takes to index a page and on crawled, currently not indexed went live at 10:00 and 12:00 and were sent to IndexNow a minute later. We requested indexing for both in one Search Console run that ended at 13:14, and Googlebot fetched them during it, 191 and 67 minutes after they were sent. Bingbot hadn't fetched either by 13:22, when we stopped counting.
So the two engines didn't get the same push. Google had the sitemap plus a manual request per post, and fetched each new post within about three hours. Bing had IndexNow, plus the sitemap through Bing Webmaster Tools from about 14:40, 80 minutes after the first submission, and of everything we sent it fetched only /start, through links. That's one new site over one day, and Bing could behave differently on a site it already crawls.
Why Bing might skip a submission
Neither Bing nor indexnow.org promises a crawl. Bing's IndexNow page: "Using IndexNow does not guarantee that web pages will be crawled or indexed by search engines." The IndexNow FAQ says the search engine "evaluates whether it should crawl the URL based on its crawl quota, scheduling logic, and quality signals."
Our site gave Bing little reason to spend crawl quota on it. elmrank.com was six days old, and we hadn't built any links to it. We added it to Bing Webmaster Tools on October 20 by importing it from Search Console, about an hour and twenty minutes after the first submission. We can't tell from our side which of these mattered. u/emplibot's reply in the same r/bigseo thread is one explanation: "Bing has fewer resources compared to Google and is therefore even stricter with how they spend their resources."
The participating engines that fetched nothing are no surprise to us either. None of them requested any of our 51 URLs in the 13 days before.
How to check whether IndexNow works on your site
The 200 or 202 tells you the submission arrived. Whether it worked shows up in your server log, so check there.
- Serve the key file at the site root and confirm it loads before you submit
- Send only new, changed and deleted URLs; keep the full list in your sitemap
- Expect 202 on the first submission and 200 after
- In your access log, look for bingbot requests to the submitted URLs in the following day, and match the IPs against bingbot.json, since anyone can use the name
- Add the site to Bing Webmaster Tools and submit the sitemap there too
- Don't count on IndexNow for Google, which isn't a participant; Search Console and your sitemap cover Google
If your site sits behind Cloudflare, make sure your server logs the visitor's IP and not Cloudflare's, or the IP check above won't work. We restore it from the CF-Connecting-IP header.
Where IndexNow sits in our plan
We still use IndexNow, because a new or changed page costs one request to send and the protocol exists for that. Our terms describe it the way it behaved for us: "We send new and changed pages through IndexNow, which passes them to Bing and the other search engines that use it. Each search engine still decides whether to crawl and index a page." In the first month we also verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools.
What we don't do is report a 200 from IndexNow as progress. The numbers we report are your Search Console clicks and impressions, as in our sample report. The technical SEO service page lists what the first month covers, and the plan is $500 for the first month and $300 a month after. To see what we'd fix first on your site, send it to us: the list is free, and we reply within 12 hours.
How we know this
Written by Tyler Phan. Every source below was read on the date shown; the page was last reviewed on Oct 23, 2026.
- IndexNow.org, FAQ, accessed Oct 21, 2026
- IndexNow.org, participating search engines (searchengines.json), accessed Oct 21, 2026
- Bing, How to add IndexNow to your website, accessed Oct 21, 2026
- Bing, bingbot IP ranges (bingbot.json), accessed Oct 21, 2026
- Google Search Central, Googlebot IP ranges (googlebot.json), accessed Oct 21, 2026
- r/bigseo, Why Won't Bing Index My Website? Need SEO Help! (comments by u/saltedjellyfish, u/WebLinkr, u/emplibot), accessed Oct 21, 2026
- Elmrank, our IndexNow submissions (deploy logs), our Request Indexing runs in Search Console and our VPS access log, October 7 to 21, 2026, accessed Oct 21, 2026
- Elmrank, Terms of Service, accessed Oct 21, 2026
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