indexnow submit

Submit one or more URLs to an IndexNow endpoint.

Synopsis

indexnow submit [urls...] [flags]

Exactly one URL source is required:

• positional args: indexnow submit URL [URL ...]
• --file PATH — one URL per line, # for comments, blank lines skipped
• --stdin — read URLs from stdin
• --sitemap URL|PATH — fetch URLs from a sitemap (sitemapindex is followed recursively, .gz is gunzipped). Optional --sitemap-since <RFC3339> filters entries by <lastmod>; entries without <lastmod> always pass — absent signal is treated as "may have changed", which is the safe default for a notification protocol.

Flags

Flag	Purpose
--key	IndexNow key (env: INDEXNOW_KEY)
--host	Site host, e.g. example.com (env: INDEXNOW_HOST; inferred otherwise)
--key-location	Absolute URL to the hosted key file (env: INDEXNOW_KEY_LOCATION)
--endpoint	One alias or full URL, or a comma-separated list (parallel fan-out)
--config PATH	Yaml config with host/key/key_location/endpoint/user_agent defaults
--user-agent STRING	HTTP User-Agent header (env: INDEXNOW_USER_AGENT; default: indexnow/<version>)
--file PATH	Read URLs from file
--stdin	Read URLs from stdin
--sitemap URL\|PATH	Fetch URLs from a sitemap (sitemapindex recursed; .gz gunzipped)
--sitemap-since RFC3339	Filter sitemap entries by <lastmod> (entries without lastmod always pass)
--sitemap-timeout DURATION	Per-request HTTP timeout for sitemap fetches (default 30s)
--dry-run	Print what would be sent and exit
--output text\|json	Output format
-q, --quiet	Suppress stdout; rely on exit code (errors still go to stderr)
-v, --verbose	Log submit lifecycle and retry events to stderr (slog text format)
--fail-on any\|4xx\|5xx\|never	Which responses trigger exit 1
--max-retries N	Retries on 429 / 5xx / transport errors (default 3)
--base-backoff DURATION	Base retry backoff (default 1s)
--max-backoff DURATION	Max retry backoff (default 30s)

Examples

indexnow submit https://example.com/post/1
indexnow submit --file urls.txt --endpoint bing
cat urls.txt | indexnow submit --stdin --output json
indexnow submit --endpoint bing,yandex https://example.com/post/1
indexnow submit -q https://example.com/post/1 && echo ok || echo failed
indexnow submit --sitemap https://example.com/sitemap.xml
indexnow submit --sitemap sitemap.xml.gz --sitemap-since 2026-05-01T00:00:00Z

Exit codes

• 0 — OK
• 1 — submission failed (HTTP / network / fail-on triggered)
• 2 — usage error