IndexNow — push-on-publish indexing

Instead of waiting for a crawler to find a changed page, IndexNow lets you tell the search engines the moment a URL is published or updated. Pro submits to the shared api.indexnow.org endpoint, which propagates to every participating engine — Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, Yep — in one call (no per-engine fan-out).

It is off by default. Nothing touches the network until you enable it and a URL is submitted.

Setup

1. Generate a key

IndexNow proves you own the host with a key — 8–128 characters of [a-f0-9-] (a 32-character hex string is ideal). Generate one once and keep it stable, then expose it via the environment:

SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_ENABLED=true
SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_KEY=0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef

The key is read through config, so it survives config:cache

Unlike the Search Console credentials, the IndexNow key is not a secret — it is served publicly at /{key}.txt to prove you own the host. So Pro resolves it through the config layer (indexnow.key, which defaults to env('SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_KEY')). That is deliberate: env() outside a config file returns null once config:cache has run (the state every normal deploy leaves the app in), so a key read at call time would silently vanish on production. Read through config, it is captured by config:cache and always available. The trade-off: rotating the key means re-running php artisan config:cache. The key is never logged. See Config-cached servers if the key file 404s in production.

2. Serve the key file

IndexNow fetches https://{host}/{key}.txt (containing only the key) to verify ownership. With the route toggle on (the default), Pro serves it for you:

GET https://example.com/0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef.txt  →  the key, text/plain

Only the one configured key path serves; any other *.txt 404s, and the whole route 404s when IndexNow is disabled. Prefer to host the file yourself (or on a CDN)? Turn route off and point key_location at your URL.

Submitting URLs

Automatically, on save (the push-on-publish path)

Add the trait to a model and turn on auto_submit. Every save queues a submission of the model's getUrlForSEO():

use Rankbeam\Seo\Pro\IndexNow\Concerns\SubmitsToIndexNow;

class Post extends Model
{
    use SubmitsToIndexNow;
}

SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_AUTO_SUBMIT=true

The trait honours a publish gate: implement shouldSubmitToIndexNow(): bool for full control, otherwise it falls back to an is_published attribute, otherwise it submits on every save. Submission is always queued, so saving a model never blocks on the network.

Manually

use Rankbeam\Seo\Pro\Facades\SeoPro;

SeoPro::indexNow()->submit('https://example.com/blog/my-post');   // one URL
SeoPro::indexNow()->submit([$urlA, $urlB]);                        // many (batched)
SeoPro::indexNow()->submitModel($post);                            // a model's URL
SeoPro::indexNow()->submitSitemap();                               // every sitemap URL

submit() queues by default; pass queue: false to run inline.

From the command line

php artisan seo-pro:indexnow https://example.com/a https://example.com/b
php artisan seo-pro:indexnow --sitemap     # submit every URL in the sitemap registry
php artisan seo-pro:indexnow --sitemap --sync   # run inline instead of queuing

Same-host only

Every URL is validated as http(s) and belonging to the configured host; anything else is dropped (counted, never sent) — you can only submit URLs you own, and the endpoint would reject a host mismatch anyway. Lists larger than max_urls_per_request (10000, the protocol cap) are chunked automatically.

Configuration

// config/seo-pro.php → 'indexnow'
'indexnow' => [
    'enabled' => env('SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_ENABLED', false),
    'key' => env('SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_KEY'),   // the key itself, captured by config:cache
    'key_env' => 'SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_KEY',   // fallback env-var NAME (real OS env var) when 'key' is empty
    'key_location' => env('SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_KEY_LOCATION'),  // null = the served /{key}.txt
    'endpoint' => env('SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_ENDPOINT', 'https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow'),
    'host' => env('SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_HOST'),  // null = derived from app.url
    'route' => env('SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_ROUTE', true),         // serve /{key}.txt
    'auto_submit' => env('SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_AUTO_SUBMIT', false),
    'max_urls_per_request' => 10000,
    'timeout' => 10,
    'queue' => [
        'connection' => env('SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_QUEUE_CONNECTION'),
        'name' => env('SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_QUEUE'),
    ],
    'tries' => 3,
    'backoff' => 30,
],

How retries work

The queued SubmitToIndexNowJob is resilient about what should be retried: a 429 (rate-limited), 5xx, or timeout is retried with backoff up to tries times; a 400/403/422 (a permanent client error — bad key, host mismatch) is logged and stops rather than wasting retries. 200 and 202 (received / pending key check) are both successes.

In production, give the job a dedicated queue so a slow endpoint never delays user-facing work:

Schedule::command('seo-pro:indexnow --sitemap')->daily();

Troubleshooting

Config-cached servers

If /{key}.txt 404s in production — or submissions silently do nothing — while indexnow.enabled is clearly true, the cause is almost always a key that lives only in .env on a server running php artisan config:cache. Laravel does not parse .env once config is cached, so env('SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_KEY') returns null, the key-file route never registers, and every submission is rejected as "not configured".

The default config resolves indexnow.key from env(...), so a normal setup is captured at cache-build time and this just works. It only bites when you have published the config and removed the env(...) default, or set the key under a custom key_env name that exists only in .env. Two ways to fix it:

1. Keep the key in config (recommended) — leave indexnow.key as env('SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_KEY') (or set a literal), then re-run php artisan config:cache. Rotating the key later means re-caching.
2. Inject a real environment variable — set SEO_PRO_INDEXNOW_KEY as an actual OS/process env var (PHP-FPM pool env[...], systemd Environment=, or your platform's env-var settings), not just .env. Real OS env vars are readable even when config is cached.

Run php artisan seo:doctor to confirm: it reports "IndexNow is enabled but no valid key resolves" with the exact remedy when it detects this state, and Pro also logs a warning once per process when the app boots config-cached with an unreadable key.

Google

Google does not participate in IndexNow. For Google, use the Search Console integration and a fresh sitemap.