indexing API
An API — most commonly IndexNow (Bing/Yandex) or Google's Indexing API — that pushes URL changes to a search index in real time instead of waiting for crawlers.
Indexing APIs flip the model from 'crawl-pull' to 'publisher-push'. Instead of waiting for a search engine's crawler to discover a change, you notify the index directly via an HTTP request. The result is indexing latency measured in seconds or minutes instead of days.
The most broadly useful is IndexNow, operated jointly by Bing and Yandex and open-protocol (Cloudflare, Wix, Duda, and many CMSes have native support). Submitting a URL to IndexNow propagates it to Bing within minutes, which in turn feeds ChatGPT's browsing-mode grounding layer.
Google's Indexing API is narrower — it's restricted to job postings and live-stream broadcasts in its supported documentation. For general content, submitting via Search Console's URL Inspection tool is the next-best option.
In AIRRNK
AIRRNK can be configured to automatically submit updated pages to IndexNow after fix deployment, compressing the usual days-long crawl-recrawl cycle down to minutes. This is one of the largest reasons our fix-to-citation-lift curve is steeper than doing the same fixes manually.
- llms.txt
A Markdown file at a site's root that tells AI crawlers what the site is about and which URLs are canonical — a kind of robots.txt for language models.
- Generative Engine Optimization
The practice of making a website more likely to be cited by AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Mode) rather than simply ranked on a traditional search results page.
- Schema Markup
Structured data embedded in a page (usually as JSON-LD) that describes what the page is about in a machine-readable vocabulary defined at schema.org.
Written by
The AIRank Editorial Team
Research & editorial, AIRank
The AIRank editorial team runs the 47-point scanner, the Observer pings, and the GEO research programme every week. Writing is reviewed by the core engineers who build the Injector, Blaster, and Surgeon agents.
About the team →