IndexNow 429 for days after a big batch, and the fix

Short answer. api.indexnow.org throttles a host after a large burst and keeps answering 429 even to single-URL requests, in our case for three days. The same requests get 202 from yandex.com/indexnow and www.bing.com/indexnow. Submit to an engine directly (one notification is shared with all of them), keep batches under a few hundred URLs, and run only one IndexNow sender per site.

What happened

On 1 November we pushed a site’s whole sitemap, 1,622 URLs, through https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow in one request. The response was 200. From then on, every request for that host got 429 Too Many Requests: the nightly job from the site itself, the panel’s queue, and a single-URL test from a laptop. The key file at the site root returned 200 the whole time, so the key wasn’t the problem.

Three days later it was still 429.

What the direct endpoints said

Same key, same single URL, sent to the engines’ own endpoints:

Endpoint	Response
api.indexnow.org/indexnow	429
www.bing.com/indexnow	202 Accepted
yandex.com/indexnow	202 Accepted

The shared endpoint is a convenience proxy. Its throttling is per host and, after a large burst, lasts far longer than the engines’ own limits.

The fix

seops now:

1. Submits directly to the engines, never through the shared endpoint: Yandex first, because IndexNow shares a notification with every participating engine (Bing included); Bing’s own endpoint only as a fallback, since it rate-limits requests coming from Cloudflare’s shared egress addresses.
2. Sends in batches of at most a few hundred URLs, one batch every 30 minutes, rotating across sites.
3. Backs off per engine on 429 (20 → 40 → 80 → 120 minutes) instead of stopping everything.
4. Logs the response code of every batch, so the IndexNow page shows “Yandex 202” rather than a vague “sent”.

If your site also runs its own IndexNow plugin or cron, turn one of them off. Two senders for the same host double the burst and halve the time until a 429.

How to check your own setup

• Open https://yourdomain/KEY.txt. It must return 200 with only the key as the body.
• Send one URL with curl:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" -X POST "https://www.bing.com/indexnow" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  -d '{"host":"example.com","key":"YOUR_KEY","keyLocation":"https://example.com/YOUR_KEY.txt","urlList":["https://example.com/"]}'

202 is good. 403 means the key file isn’t readable from the location you gave. 422 means the URLs don’t belong to the host. 429 means wait.

Why it matters for AI search

ChatGPT search and Copilot read the Bing index. A page that Bing hasn’t crawled can’t be cited there, however well it ranks on Google. IndexNow is the cheapest way to shorten that gap, which is why seops treats a working IndexNow setup as part of AI visibility, not just Bing SEO.

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