How to submit your website to search engines: Google, Bing and IndexNow

Do you still need to submit your website to search engines?

Not in the way the phrase suggests. Google says the vast majority of pages in its results are found automatically rather than submitted, and that it primarily finds pages through links from pages it has already crawled (How Google Search works, SEO Starter Guide). No form puts a site into the index, and Google does not accept payment to crawl a site more often or rank it higher.

Lists of 100 “search engine submission sites” answer an older question. Google’s own page on hiring an SEO says to avoid anyone who talks about submitting your site to thousands of search engines, and calls it “typically useless exercises” (Do you need an SEO?). The same page warns against anyone advertising priority submission to Google. Before working through a list, ask of each name whether it runs its own index or shows results borrowed from another engine.

What is left is short: verify your site in Google Search Console and give it your sitemap, do the same in Bing Webmaster Tools, and tell the engines that support IndexNow when a URL changes. Links do the rest. Submitting tells an engine that a URL exists and can prompt a crawl; whether the page is indexed stays the engine’s call.

How to submit your website to Google

Everything starts in Google Search Console, which is free. Add a property, then prove that you own it (property types, verification methods):

• A Domain property (example.com) covers every subdomain, www included, and both http and https. It is verified with a DNS record at your domain name provider.
• A URL-prefix property (https://example.com) covers only that prefix. It accepts an HTML file at the root, an HTML tag in the homepage head, your Google Analytics code or your Google Tag Manager container.
• Choose the Domain property if you can edit DNS: one record, and the whole site shows up in one place.
• Then follow the order Google gives new owners: verify, make sure Google can find and read your pages, and consider a sitemap, which Google calls optional because pages can be discovered without it (Search Console getting started).
• Rule out settings that block indexing. The free robots.txt generator writes a file that lets crawlers in and names your sitemap, and the SERP simulator shows how your title and description will read once a page appears. The product launch checklist puts these checks four weeks before launch.

How to submit a sitemap to Google

A sitemap lists the URLs you want found, with an optional last-modified date for each. Google takes it through the Sitemaps report in Search Console, a Sitemap line in robots.txt or the Search Console API. One file holds at most 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed; larger sites split theirs under a sitemap index (Build and submit a sitemap).

In the Sitemaps report, paste the sitemap URL under Add a new sitemap. A Success status means the file was read, not that its pages were indexed: Google states there is no guarantee that a URL found in a sitemap will be crawled or indexed. Google rereads the file on its own schedule, so resubmit only after a big change (Sitemaps report help).

Two habits from older guides no longer apply. The anonymous sitemap ping address is gone: Google announced on June 26, 2023 that it would stop working within six months (Search Central blog). The same post asks for lastmod dates that reflect the last significant change. A date that moves on every build teaches Google to ignore it.

MegaLaunch’s sitemap gives each product page its publication date and each article its last update. Its robots.txt names the sitemap and blocks private areas such as the admin, but leaves the login and submission pages crawlable on purpose: they carry a noindex tag, and Google can only read a noindex rule on a page it may fetch (Block indexing with noindex).

Submit a URL to Google with the URL Inspection tool

To submit one URL to Google, paste it into the inspection bar of Search Console, then use Request indexing. Google sets three limits: a daily cap on requests per property, no guarantee that the page will be indexed, and no benefit from asking several times for the same URL (URL Inspection help, Ask Google to recrawl).

Keep it for the few pages that matter on launch day, such as the homepage and the pricing page. Google says crawling can take from a few days to a few weeks, so a page still missing two days after a request is not a failure.

How to submit your website to Bing

In Bing Webmaster Tools, the quickest start is to import your sites from Google Search Console. Bing lists your verified Google properties with their sitemaps, verifies the ones you pick automatically, takes up to 100 sites per import and keeps syncing new sitemaps through that connection. Without Google, verify with an XML file, a meta tag, a CNAME record or Domain Connect (Add and verify a site).

Bing names the routes it uses to discover URLs: IndexNow, XML sitemaps, crawlable internal links and external links from relevant websites. It also states that robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing (Bing Webmaster Guidelines). The manual Submit URLs tool still takes up to 10,000 URLs per domain per day, but Bing recommends IndexNow and says manual submission may be deprecated. Either way, Bing may decline URLs that miss its selection criteria (Bing URL submission).

Bing also reaches beyond its own results page: DuckDuckGo says it largely sources its traditional links from Bing, alongside its own crawler (DuckDuckGo help).

What is IndexNow?

IndexNow is an open protocol for telling search engines that a URL was added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for their next crawl (indexnow.org). You host a key of 8 to 128 characters in a text file at the root of your site, then send URLs with a GET request for one or a JSON POST for up to 10,000. A 200 or 202 response means the URL was received, not indexed (IndexNow documentation).

The useful part is sharing: participating engines pass a submitted URL on to each other (IndexNow FAQ). The list on indexnow.org names Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver and Yep, plus Amazon’s crawler and the Internet Archive (participant list). Google is not on it, so IndexNow complements Search Console and does not replace it.

The protocol asks you to send a URL when its content changes, not to resend unchanged ones, and to keep the sitemap for full coverage. Bing adds that IndexNow does not guarantee crawling or indexing, and lists builders where it is already built in, such as Wix and Duda, plus plugins for WordPress and Shopify (Bing IndexNow). Check your stack before writing code.

How MegaLaunch sends IndexNow from its own code

MegaLaunch is a Next.js app, and IndexNow took one small module plus a call wherever a public page changes. The key file sits at the domain root. One function keeps only https URLs on our host, removes duplicates, caps the list at 10,000 and posts it to api.indexnow.org with a five-second timeout. Only production sends anything, so previews never ping a search engine. The calls follow the life of a listing and an article:

• A Free listing goes live 48 hours after submission through an hourly job, which sends the listings it publishes in the same run.
• A paid launch is sent when its payment is confirmed, a reviewed listing when a moderator approves it.
• An edited listing, a new image or video, or a listing back online after its link back was restored is sent again.
• A blog post sends its URL and the blog index when it is published, updated or taken down. Articles that ship with a deploy go out afterwards through a small script that can read recent lastmod dates from the sitemap.
• At 00:00 UTC, when a launch day starts, the home page and the leaderboard are sent.

What we would copy, and what we left out

One listing change sends three URLs: the product page, its category page and the /products archive, because a new product changes all three. A product that is not public sends nothing. The call runs after the response has gone back to the maker and never throws, so a slow or failed IndexNow request only leaves a line in our logs. That is the design we would recommend to any small team: a notification is a hint, and it should never break the feature that triggered it.

We do not resend the whole sitemap every day or push unchanged pages, which the protocol advises against. Google gets the same URLs through the sitemap and internal links.

How to get Google to index your site faster

Google has no push channel for ordinary pages, so speed comes from links on pages it already crawls and from a sitemap it can trust.

• Put the homepage online before launch day. A coming soon page that stays indexable gives Google weeks to find the domain, and a pre-launch marketing plan gives people reasons to link to it.
• Link the site from accounts you already have, and link your own pages to each other.
• Describe the product with structured data: the free schema markup generator writes JSON-LD for a software application. Google uses structured data to understand a page (structured data introduction), but markup is not a submission.

Where a launch listing fits

A launch listing is one of those pages. On MegaLaunch, a Free listing goes live 48 hours after you submit it, once we have checked your link back to MegaLaunch. Its product page links to your website with no nofollow or sponsored attribute, appears in our sitemap and is sent to IndexNow when it goes live. In exchange, the Free plan asks for a link back to MegaLaunch on your site, which you may leave followed or mark nofollow, ugc or sponsored, and which we check every week while the listing is published. We do not promise that Google will index your site because of it: the listing adds one followed path to your domain, and the rest is the engine’s decision.

The plans are on the pricing page and the launch guide walks through the form. Whether directory links help rankings is a separate question, covered in do directory submissions help SEO?.

Why is my site not indexed on Google?

If a page is still missing after a few weeks, inspect its URL and open the Page indexing report. Most causes are on a short list (Page indexing report help):

• A noindex rule left over from development, in a meta tag or an HTTP header.
• A robots.txt block. Google can still index a blocked URL that others link to, and cannot read a noindex tag on it (robots.txt introduction).
• A canonical tag pointing to another URL, or a page treated as a duplicate of one already indexed.
• Discovered - currently not indexed: Google knows the URL but has not crawled it, typically to avoid overloading the site.
• Crawled - currently not indexed: Google fetched the page and left it out. There is no need to resubmit it; the work is on the page itself.
• Nothing wrong: Google says not to expect every URL to be indexed, only canonical pages. Check the pages a customer should land on.