We shipped a feature that pinged Google every time someone published a post on Postlark. A single HTTP call to a well-documented endpoint. In production, that endpoint had been silently returning 404s for over a year.

The Ping That Nobody Answered

For years, Google offered a sitemap notification URL: hit their /ping endpoint with your sitemap location, and Googlebot would schedule a visit. It was the polite way to say "I published something new." WordPress does it. Jekyll does it. Dozens of CMS platforms had it baked in as a default behavior.

Then Google quietly deprecated the whole thing in June 2023. Their reasoning was blunt — the vast majority of pings were spam, and the legitimate ones were redundant because Googlebot was already discovering content through other channels. The endpoint kept accepting requests for a while, then started returning 404. No exceptions, no error codes that would trip an alert. Just a response that meant nothing anymore.

We caught it months later while auditing our publish pipeline. The fix was trivially small: delete the Google call, keep the other one.

IndexNow Picked Up Where Google Hung Up

While Google was quietly pulling the plug, Microsoft and Yandex had been building a replacement — or rather, a successor that's more ambitious than Google's old endpoint ever was. IndexNow launched in late 2021 as an open protocol for instant URL submission. Generate a key, host a verification file on your domain, POST your changed URLs, and every participating search engine gets notified simultaneously.

The mechanism is deliberately simple. Your key is an alphanumeric string — 8 to 128 characters — that you host as a text file at your domain root. When content changes, you fire a POST with the updated URLs, up to 10,000 per batch. Submit to any one participating engine and the rest receive the notification automatically. One call, multiple indexes updated.

The numbers have gotten serious. As of early 2026, over 80 million websites actively use the protocol. Daily URL submissions crossed 5 billion, up from 3.5 billion in 2024. Bing reports that 22% of all clicked URLs in their results originated from IndexNow submissions. For a standard that's barely four years old, that's a steep trajectory.

Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam, and Yep all participate. That list matters more than it looks — Naver dominates Korean-language search, Seznam owns roughly a third of the Czech market. If your content reaches beyond English-speaking audiences, these engines aren't optional.

Google Won't Join, and That's the Whole Problem

Google has been "evaluating" the protocol since 2021. Five years of evaluation with no commitment.

The reason is structural. Google's crawl infrastructure is enormous and largely self-sufficient. They discover content through Googlebot, robots.txt sitemap directives, Search Console, and <lastmod> timestamps. From their perspective, a push protocol adds noise they don't need — they're already pulling everything on their own schedule.

There's a trust dimension too. The old ping endpoint died partly because unauthenticated submissions were a spam vector. The key-based verification in the new protocol helps, but Google has evidently decided the cost of integrating an external signal doesn't justify the benefit.

What Platform Builders Actually Need to Do

This fragmentation means there's no single "notify all search engines" API anymore. If you're building a CMS, blog platform, or any system that publishes web content, you need layers.

Sitemaps stay essential. Every crawler reads them — Google included. But keep your <lastmod> timestamps honest. Setting every page to today's date is the equivalent of crying wolf, and crawlers learn to deprioritize domains that do it. Only update lastmod when the content genuinely changes.

Use the open push protocol for the non-Google world. It's low-effort to implement and gives you authenticated, instant notification to five search engines at once. If you're already tracking which URLs changed during a publish event, adding a POST request is trivial.

For Google, you're mostly passive. The Indexing API exists but was originally scoped to job postings and live events. Its coverage has expanded gradually, but it's rate-limited and requires OAuth setup. For most content, you're back to waiting for Googlebot to notice your updated sitemap.

Audit the calls you're already making. This is the one that bit us. We had a publish hook firing HTTP requests to an endpoint that had been dead for over a year. No alarms, no failures — just wasted bytes. If your SEO pipeline was set up more than 18 months ago, check whether every outbound call still does what you think it does.

The Cleanup

Our fix was satisfyingly small. Rip out the dead Google ping. Keep the working path. Make sure the sitemap still regenerates on publish — that part was never broken. Net lines of code: negative.

The takeaway isn't that one search engine is better than another. It's that content discovery infrastructure is silently splintering, and if you're not periodically verifying your assumptions, you might be shouting into a disconnected phone line for months. At least 404s are free.