How to Activate IndexNow with Cloudflare

Hands-on guide to activate IndexNow for a website using Cloudflare

   ,   2 min read

If you’re running a content-first website, you probably want search engines (not you, LLMs that don’t give attribution 🫵) to index your site quickly.

There’s a relatively new standard in town called IndexNow.

So what exactly is IndexNow? Here’s their definition from the official website:

IndexNow is an easy way for website owners to instantly inform search engines and web crawlers used for information retrieval (“search engines”) about the latest content changes on their website. In its simplest form, IndexNow is a simple ping so that search engines know that a URL and its content have been added, updated, or deleted, allowing search engines to quickly reflect this change in their search results.

In simpler terms, here’s how it works:

  • 👨 : “Hi, I just created a new article. Here’s the URL. Can you index it?”
  • 🤖 : “Sure, human. I’ll index exactly the URL you gave me instead of crawling your entire website and finding it who knows when.”
  • 👨 : “Thank you, robot that always gives appropriate attribution to content creators.”
  • 🤖 : “My pleasure. Beep bop zeep…”

These are the search engines that currently support it:

  • Microsoft Bing
  • Yandex
  • DuckDuckGo

I hope Google joins soon.

There is some additional setup required to activate IndexNow. It can range from easy to complicated, depending on your platform.

Luckily, if you’re using Cloudflare as your website proxy (make sure the orange cloud is turned on), you can pretty much set it and forget it. Here’s how I did it.

Activate IndexNow on Cloudflare

If your website is proxied with Cloudflare, here’s how to activate IndexNow:

  1. Select your domain name.
  2. Click Caching from the sidebar.
  3. Click Configuration.
  4. Scroll down until you see Crawler Hints.
  5. Tick the checkbox to turn it on.
Cloudflare Caching > Configuration > Crawler Hints
Cloudflare Caching > Configuration > Crawler Hints

That’s it!

From now on, whenever you create, update, or delete content, Cloudflare will notify supported search engines and crawlers about the changes.

Now you can focus on writing more content and worry less about search engine indexing.

Conclusion

That’s it for today. I hope this simple tutorial helps you.

As usual, if you have any questions or a better method, leave a comment below. Thanks for reading, and see you next time!

References