Sitemap generator and submission helper

The endpoints most tools still advertise are gone

Search for a way to submit a sitemap and you will find pages offering to ping ten or fifty search engines in one click. Most of that stopped working in 2024.

• Google's sitemap ping is dead. Google announced the deprecation in June 2023 and the endpoint now returns 404. Their guidance is to reference the sitemap from robots.txt or submit it in Search Console.
• Google's Webmaster Tools sitemaps API is marked "Deprecated; do not use."
• Bing's ping endpoint returns 410 Gone. Bing replaced it with IndexNow.
• Yahoo has been powered by Bing since 2010, so it is covered by Bing rather than submitted to separately. Ask.com stopped accepting sitemaps.

What remains is two things: Google, manually, through Search Console; and IndexNow for Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam.

Google does not participate in IndexNow

This is the detail that matters most and gets left out. IndexNow was created by Microsoft and Yandex, and Google has not joined it. Submitting to IndexNow does nothing for your Google ranking. If a tool implies otherwise, that is the claim to check.

For Google there is no shortcut. Verify the property in Search Console, submit the sitemap once, and wait.

Why this page cannot submit for you

Two reasons, both structural rather than a limitation of effort:

• CORS. The IndexNow endpoint does not permit cross-origin requests from a browser, so a page on one domain cannot POST on behalf of another.
• You should not paste your key into someone else's page. The key is what proves you own the domain. Anything asking for it, including this page, should be assumed to be able to keep it. This tool generates the key in your browser and never transmits it, which you can verify by reading the source, and that is still a weaker guarantee than generating it yourself.

So this generates the key and the exact command, and you run it.

What a 202 actually means

The response codes are easy to misread:

• 200 — accepted, key already verified.
• 202 — accepted, key verification pending. Normal on a first submission. Not an error, and not a confirmation of indexing.
• 403 — the key file was not found at keyLocation, or its contents did not match. Check that the file is served as plain text and contains only the key.
• 422 — the URLs do not belong to the host that owns the key.

None of these mean a page was indexed. They mean a crawler was told the page exists. Submission accelerates discovery; it does not oblige anyone to index or rank anything.

Keep the key file where a rebuild cannot delete it

A static site generator that clears its output directory on publish will delete a key file dropped there by hand, and submissions then fail with 403 for reasons that look unrelated to the deploy. Generate the key file as part of the build.