When you add a product, change a price, or publish a blog post, you want search engines to pick it up as quickly as possible. Normally you have to wait for their crawlers to revisit your store — and that can take days or even weeks. IndexNow removes the wait.
What is IndexNow?
IndexNow is an open protocol supported by Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, and other participating search engines. Instead of waiting to be crawled, your store proactively notifies these engines the moment a page is added, updated, or deleted, so they can re-index it right away. Faster indexing means your new products and content changes show up in search results sooner.
Note: Google does not currently use IndexNow — it relies on sitemaps and regular crawling, which Smart SEO manages for you as well.
What Smart SEO does for you
On its own, IndexNow requires hosting a special key file on your domain and calling an API every time something changes. Smart SEO automates the entire process:
One-click activation. Smart SEO generates your unique IndexNow key and hosts the key file on your storefront automatically — no theme edits, no code.
Automatic submissions. Twice a day, Smart SEO scans your products, collections, pages, and blog posts, and submits every URL that changed since the last scan.
Manual submissions. Need something indexed right now? Paste in up to 1,000 URLs and submit them instantly.
Full transparency. Every submission is logged, searchable, and kept for 90 days.
How to activate IndexNow
Step 1. In Smart SEO, open the Indexing section and click Configure on the IndexNow card.
Step 2. Click Activate. Smart SEO generates your key, publishes the key file to your storefront, and shows an Active badge together with your key file URL.
That’s it — from this moment Smart SEO watches your store and submits changes automatically.
Submitting URLs manually
Sometimes you don’t want to wait for the next automatic scan — for example, right after launching a product or fixing an important page. Click the Submit URLs button in the top-right corner of the IndexNow page, enter up to 1,000 URLs (one per line), and click Submit. Only HTTPS URLs on your store’s domain can be submitted, and anything you already submitted earlier the same day is skipped automatically, so there is no harm in submitting a page twice.
Tracking your submissions
The IndexNow page gives you a complete picture of what has been submitted: total, successful, and failed submissions at a glance, plus a detailed log showing each URL, whether it was submitted automatically or manually, and the response from IndexNow. You can filter by status and search by URL.
Good to know
IndexNow is available on the Pro plan and above.
Your online store must not be password protected — search engines need to reach your key file to verify submissions.
You can rotate your key or deactivate IndexNow at any time from the same page.
Once a URL has been verified, a Verified badge confirms search engines have accepted your key.
Activate IndexNow today and let search engines know about your changes the moment they happen.