What it is
Google's Indexing API accepts URL_UPDATED and URL_DELETED notifications. When you ping a URL, Googlebot adds it to a priority crawl queue and typically visits within hours instead of the days-to-weeks for organic sitemap discovery.
``bash
curl -X POST https://indexing.googleapis.com/v3/urlNotifications:publish -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"url": "https://your-site.com/page", "type": "URL_UPDATED"}'
``
The official-vs-actual situation
Google's documentation states the Indexing API is for JobPosting and BroadcastEvent content only. They've said this since launch. In practice, they accept pings for any URL and crawl them — Indexing API for generic pages is a known unofficially-supported pattern.
No SLA. They can stop accepting non-job pings whenever they choose. As of 2026 it still works.
Quota
200 requests/day on the free tier. Enough for most sites' incremental updates. Initial backfill of a large site may need batching across days.
When to wire it up
When you have programmatic pages (long-tail SEO templates) and want Google to discover them in hours. We wired it into our revalidate webhook from Strapi — when a FAQ question changes, the URL gets pinged.
For a one-time backfill of new sections, a batch script works once and you're done. The script we use is open source style; you can adapt the pattern from our analytics scripts.
Sitemap is still the foundation
Don't replace sitemap with Indexing API pings. Sitemap is what Google trusts as canonical structure. Indexing API is the "crawl this faster" hint on top.
