indexnow key verify

Verify that the hosted IndexNow key file matches the expected key. Useful before the first submission, or as a smoke test in a deploy pipeline after rotating the key file.

The top-level indexnow verify form is kept as a backwards-compatibility alias for scripts written against v0.3.0–v0.6.x. Behavior is identical to indexnow key verify. New code should prefer the canonical form.

Synopsis

indexnow key verify [flags]
# or equivalently:
indexnow verify [flags]

The command performs a single HTTP GET against the hosted key URL and compares the trimmed response body to --key. No retries — this is a one-shot diagnostic.

URL resolution

• If --key-location is provided, that absolute URL is fetched.
• Otherwise, the conventional location https://<host>/<key>.txt is derived from --host and --key. Both are required in that case, and --key must satisfy IndexNow's key format ([A-Za-z0-9-]{8,128}).

Flags

Flag	Purpose
--key	IndexNow key (env: INDEXNOW_KEY)
--host	Site host, e.g. example.com (env: INDEXNOW_HOST)
--key-location	Absolute URL to the hosted key file (env: INDEXNOW_KEY_LOCATION)
--config PATH	Yaml config with host/key/key_location/user_agent defaults
--user-agent STRING	HTTP User-Agent header (env: INDEXNOW_USER_AGENT; default: indexnow/<version>)
--timeout DURATION	HTTP timeout for the key fetch (default 10s)
--output text\|json	Output format
-q, --quiet	Suppress stdout; rely on exit code
-v, --verbose	Log lifecycle events to stderr (slog text format)

Examples

# Implicit URL: https://example.com/<KEY>.txt
indexnow verify --host example.com --key abcdef1234567890

# Custom hosting path
indexnow verify --key abcdef1234567890 \
  --key-location https://static.example.com/indexnow/key.txt

# Scripted: silent on success, exit code is the truth
indexnow verify -q --host example.com --key abcdef1234567890 \
  && echo "key live" || echo "fix the key file"

Output

Text mode prints a single line:

OK:   https://example.com/abcdef1234567890.txt
FAIL: https://example.com/abcdef1234567890.txt status=404 err=http 404
FAIL: https://example.com/abcdef1234567890.txt status=200 err=hosted key does not match expected

JSON mode emits a single object: { "url", "ok", "status", "hosted", "error" }. The hosted field is populated on mismatch (truncated to 80 chars) so you can eyeball what's actually being served.

Exit codes

• 0 — hosted key matches
• 1 — mismatch, non-200, or network error
• 2 — usage error (missing key, malformed --key-location, etc.)