New GitHub Repos Built Around IndexNow Grew 252% in 2025, and IndexNow Pull Requests Rose 14.7 Times as a Share of Activity

Summary

Picture a landscaping company that updates its spring pricing page on Monday. Google picks up the change days later. Bing, which feeds ChatGPT search and Copilot, can know within minutes if the site pings it through IndexNow. More developers are wiring that ping into the sites they build.

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a website tell participating search engines, including Bing, that a page was added or changed. Instead of waiting for a crawler, the site sends a short notice. Several AI assistants rely on Bing's index for live web results, and interest in the protocol has grown at the same time.

We tracked IndexNow on GitHub. New repos built around it grew 252.1% in 2025. In the past year, pull requests that add or change IndexNow support grew 14.7 times as a share of all GitHub pull request activity.

What we measured

We used GH Archive, the public log of GitHub events, in Google BigQuery. First we counted original repositories with IndexNow in their name from January 2023, removing probable forks and using each repo's first recorded event as its creation date. We grouped them by the platform their name mentions.

Then, for October 2025 to October 20, 2026, we counted pull requests and new branches with IndexNow in the branch name, and new issues that mention IndexNow. GH Archive stopped including pull request titles in October 2025, so branch names stand in. Because event capture varied a lot in 2026, we divided counts by all pull request or creation events recorded in the same quarter.

IndexNow repos took off in 2025

New original repos with IndexNow in their name, by half year.

After a flat 2023 and early 2024, new repos more than doubled in late 2024 and kept climbing through 2025. The 2026 count is lower partly because of gaps in GH Archive's event capture from July onward.

IndexNow work inside existing projects grew even faster

IndexNow pull requests and branches by quarter, raw and per million recorded events of the same type.

The number of repos touching IndexNow each quarter rose from 29 in Q4 2025 to 323 in Q3 2026. Much of this likely happens in website codebases, where a developer adds an IndexNow ping to the publish step.

Most IndexNow repos are custom builds

IndexNow repos first seen January 2023 to October 20, 2026, grouped by the platform named in the repo.

CMS plugins are a small share on GitHub, likely because many platforms ship IndexNow support built in or through their own plugin directories. On GitHub, the growth comes from teams adding it to their own sites and build pipelines.

What this means

If your site changes often, such as prices, inventory, events or new service pages, IndexNow helps Bing and other participating engines see those changes quickly. Since several AI assistants pull live results from Bing's index, faster indexing there can mean fresher answers about your business.

Many CMS platforms and SEO plugins can turn IndexNow on with a setting. Check whether yours does, and confirm it is actually sending notices. How current are AI answers about your business, and are your pages reaching the indexes they use? Those two basics of LLM optimization are what a free AI visibility audit checks.

Limits

We matched repo names, branch names and issue text. Projects that add IndexNow without naming it in those places are missed, so all counts are minimums.

GH Archive stopped including pull request titles and new-repo descriptions in October 2025. It also captured far fewer events from May 2026 and had gaps in October 2025 and August to October 2026, which is why we use per-million rates.

The link between IndexNow and AI search is through Bing's index. We show that interest in IndexNow grew at the same time; we do not claim AI search caused it.

Fork removal and first-seen dates are heuristics based on recorded events.

Frequently asked questions

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