IndexNow is a push-notification system that sends changes to website content (e.g., page additions, deletions, and updates) to participating search engines. This can drastically cut down on the time it takes for those search engines to index the content for search results.
The Five Most-Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- Supported search engines include Microsoft Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex, and Yep.
- You will notice a missing name from that list: Google. Yes, that search engine is popular, but something that levels the playing field is that A.I. chatbots may be searching the web across different search engines.
- Another thing that could level the playing field is that search engines like Bing are increasingly becoming like chatbots. The idea for tech companies seems to be to eliminate middlemannish chatbots for search, and instead make search resemble chatbots.
- Without IndexNow, changes to web pages may go without notice for days or even weeks, when the search engines’ web crawlers may find it. IndexNow can help ensure the changed web pages get an immediate indexing within minutes or hours.
- As more search engines integrate A.I. solutions and upgrades, these search engines will become quicker at collecting, analyzing, and updating search-engine results pages (S.E.R.P.s).
The Significance for Business Owners
IndexNow will be an important tool for business owners to make sure their site content’s updates fall under the notice of A.I. chatbots and A.I.-powered search engines sooner than later.
A.I. in search will make searching faster and easier by taking less of the burden of sifting through results off of the user. Instead, A.I. will generate summaries—with citation URLs to web-page sources, depending on the A.I. that you are using—that pull the latest information on, for example, products and services in your business’s area.
So, making sure the indexed web pages are up-to-date can help business owners stay competitive with businesses that are diligently ensuring their web-page changes are properly indexed.
The Almighty Index
If you are a business owner who knows next to nothing about how search engines work, you likely have experience using a search engine.
Think of the search-engine results page (S.E.R.P.) that you seen whenever you type a query into Google.
Those blue or purple links are there because of Google’s web crawler, which is essentially an automated system for identifying what is on the Internet and where. This web crawler indexes Internet content it encounters so that the search engine can direct users to web pages.
However, the web crawler by itself is not going to go to a changed web page the minute it changes. Hence the use of a push-notification protocol like IndexNow that lets search engines know that a website needs to be crawled and indexed.
IndexNow is important because some changes to content are time-sensitive. For business owners, an example of this could be a shoe store’s web page promoting a sitewide end-of-summer sale on flip flops.
By using the IndexNow protocol, that can be a good way to ensure that the participating search engines index the time-sensitive web page sooner than later.
Why No Google Support?
The largest search engine in the world apparently has a lot of faith in the efficiency of its own crawlers. Google has tested IndexNow, however, though apparently Google did not find cause to overcome its concerns with IndexNow’s efficiency and sufficiency.
So, business owners should be aware that Google’s crawler will go at its own presumably fast-enough pace in indexing their updated web pages.
The Last (But Not Least) Key Takeaway from This Blog Post
Using IndexNow can be a great way to ensure that changes to web pages end up in certain search engine’s indexes so that these changes are reflected in searches sooner than later.
Other Great GO AI Blog Posts
GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole.
On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles:
- For Businesses and Other Organizations, What Makes a Successful Chatbot?
- IBM Watson vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini: How Will Each Affect Search Engines?
- Using A.I. to Find Resources for Business Owners
- How Would Restricting Open-Source A.I. Affect Business Owners?
- The EU’s A.I. Act Has Become Law: The Implications for Business Owners (Especially American)
In addition to our GO AI blog, we also have a blog that offers important updates in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), with blog posts like “Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies”.
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