IndexNow was enabled on 60,000 Cloudflare-powered websites

In less than two months after Microsoft introduced IndexNow, it has been activated by over 60,000 websites that use Cloudflare. Any search engine can join in IndexNow, which allows site owners to have their pages and information indexed quickly by the search engine.

“More than 60,000 unique websites have opted-in to Crawler Hints,” Microsoft and Cloudflare said today. Bing has received over a billion Hints from those zones indicating when certain elements on their websites have changed and need to be scanned again.” When it was announced, I switched it on for the Search Engine Roundtable, my personal search blog.

How to activate it. It’s basically controlled by a toggle switch in Cloudflare’s crawler hints area, which you can find under the cache tab, then the configuration section:

IndexNow “will begin providing signals to search engines about when they should scan particular areas of your website” once this setting is activated, according to Microsoft.

It’s possible that Google will use it. Google just announced that it will test the IndexNow protocol for indexing as well. While only Microsoft Bing and Yandex have fully implemented it, if Google does, you should anticipate other search engines to follow suit.

Why should we be concerned? Instant indexing, as previously said, is an SEO’s dream when it comes to providing search engines with the most up-to-date content on a site. The protocol is relatively basic, and adding it to your site involves very little developer effort, therefore it makes sense to adopt it if you care about fast indexing. Plus, if you utilize Cloudflare, you can turn it on and off with a switch.