Integration
IndexNow for WordPress
WordPress has several ways to submit to IndexNow. Pick one, make sure the key file it serves is real, and know what it will not cover.
Protocol facts last checked 2026-09-24.
Your options
| Option | Submits on | Key file | History |
|---|---|---|---|
| Official IndexNow plugin (Microsoft) | Publish, update, delete of posts and pages | Generated and served by the plugin | Recent submissions in the admin |
| SEO suites with IndexNow (Rank Math, AIOSEO, Yoast via integrations) | Content changes, sometimes manual | Served by the plugin | Varies |
| Host-level (Cloudflare Crawler Hints, some managed hosts) | Edge-observed changes | Not needed | None per URL |
| External monitor (AutoIndexNow) | Rendered content changes, new sitemap URLs, deploy hooks | Any key file on the host | Every attempt, exportable |
Run only one submitter
Two plugins, or a plugin plus a host feature, will each notify endpoints about the same edit. Endpoints tolerate some of this, but persistent duplicate submissions of unchanged URLs are the usual reason for 429. Choose one active submitter per site.
Check the key your plugin serves
Plugins typically serve the key file virtually through a rewrite rule rather than as a real file. Permalink changes, caching layers, security plugins and some hosts break this silently. Copy the key from the plugin settings and run the key checker against your domain; it will tell you whether the file returns 200 with the right content and no redirect.
When an external monitor helps
- You want a per-URL record of what was submitted and what the endpoint answered.
- Several WordPress sites, or a mix of WordPress and other stacks, in one place.
- Pages generated outside the editor (category archives, custom post types without hooks, headless front ends) that plugins do not submit.
- You edit through the database, migrations or imports that bypass the publish hooks.
Connect a WordPress site to AutoIndexNow
- Add the site's host in AutoIndexNow. Either paste the key your plugin already serves, or let AutoIndexNow generate one and upload
<key>.txtto the web root via SFTP or your host's file manager. - Verify. AutoIndexNow fetches the key file and shows the exact result.
- Run the initial crawl: it reads
wp-sitemap.xmlor your SEO plugin's sitemap index, renders the pages and baselines them. - Enable monitoring, then disable submission in the plugin to avoid duplicates.
A 200 or 202 from an IndexNow endpoint means the request was accepted, not that the URL is indexed. Google does not participate in IndexNow.