How to Automatically Submit a Sitemap to IndexNow#

If you use GitHub Actions to build and deploy your website, you can automate the process of submitting your sitemap to the IndexNow API. This is particularly useful if you have a large number of pages on your site that you want to submit all at once.

Find a simplified version of IndexNow for Python on GitHub Actions and begin automating your workflows:

View on GitHub Marketplace

Workflow Automation with GitHub Actions#

Regardless of whether your codebase is highly or less active, it is recommended that you do not submit your sitemap to IndexNow each time your site is deployed to production. This could overwhelm IndexNow and reduce the website's ranking.

Instead, you should automate sitemap submissions to IndexNow using GitHub Actions at regular intervals, allowing the changes to accumulate over time and allowing the search engines crawlers time to index the latest content.

Example workflow with GitHub Actions:

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name: Submit Sitemap to IndexNow

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: 0 0 1 * *  # Run at midnight UTC on the 1st day of each month.

jobs:
  submit-sitemap:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Submit sitemap URLs to IndexNow
        uses: jakob-bagterp/index-now-submit-sitemap-urls-action@v1
        with:
          host: example.com
          api_key: ${{ secrets.INDEX_NOW_API_KEY }}
          api_key_location: https://example.com/${{ secrets.INDEX_NOW_API_KEY }}.txt
          endpoint: yandex
          sitemap_locations: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Scheduled Runs#

The example above can be adjusted to run at different intervals. Simply adjust the cron job definition to your needs.

Monthly Schedule#

Run the workflow at midnight UTC on the first day of each month:

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    - cron: 0 0 1 * *

Weekly Schedule#

Run the workflow at midnight UTC on the first day of each week:

5

    - cron: 0 0 * * 0

Daily Schedule#

Run the workflow at midnight UTC on a daily basis:

5

    - cron: 0 0 * * *

Only Submit Latest Changes#

Rather than submitting all the URLs in the sitemap as one large payload to IndexNow, you can also submit only the latest changes by targeting the latest modification date of each URL in the sitemap using the <lastmod> tag. This is particularly useful if you have a large number of pages on your site that you want to submit all at once when deploying your site.

Simply adjust the sitemap_days_ago parameter to the desired number of days, as highlighted below:

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name: Submit Sitemap to IndexNow

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: 0 0 * * *  # Run daily at midnight UTC.

jobs:
  submit-sitemap:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Submit sitemap URLs to IndexNow
        uses: jakob-bagterp/index-now-submit-sitemap-urls-action@v1
        with:
          host: example.com
          api_key: ${{ secrets.INDEX_NOW_API_KEY }}
          api_key_location: https://example.com/${{ secrets.INDEX_NOW_API_KEY }}.txt
          endpoint: yandex
          sitemap_locations: https://example.com/sitemap.xml
          sitemap_days_ago: 1

Event-Triggered Workflows#

Imagine the sitemap is submitted before the site has been fully deployed. This is something we want to avoid, as otherwise we won't be using the most up-to-date sitemap.

There are several ways to trigger workflows in GitHub Actions. The most common options in this context are:

• Use needs when having several jobs in the same workflow file.
• Use workflow_run when you want to trigger jobs in different workflow files.

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on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ["My Deployment Workflow"]
    branches: [master]
    types: [completed]

GitHub Pages#

For users of GitHub Pages, you can still use the automated index-now-submit-sitemap-urls-action workflow. This will also work if you're using MkDocs to build your site with GitHub Pages, and it will probably work in many other cases as well.

All you need to do is adjust the on condition and adapt the example below to your needs:

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on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: [pages-build-deployment]
    types: [completed]

Custom GitHub Actions Workflow#

You can customise your workflow even more, although the starting point is the same: Put a YAML workflow file in the .github/workflows directory of your repository.

Imagine that we want the workflow to be triggered every time you push to the master branch or create a pull request to the master branch, and we will then execute the submit_sitemap_to_index_now() method.

Example of a workflow file:

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name: Submit sitemap to IndexNow

on:
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - master
  push:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  submit-sitemap:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Set up Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with:
          python-version: "3.13"
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: pip install index-now-for-python
      - name: Submit sitemap to IndexNow
        uses: jannekem/run-python-script-action@v1
        with:
          script: |
            from index_now import submit_sitemap_to_index_now, IndexNowAuthentication, SearchEngineEndpoint

            authentication = IndexNowAuthentication(
                host="example.com",
                api_key="${{ secrets.INDEX_NOW_API_KEY }}",
                api_key_location="https://example.com/${{ secrets.INDEX_NOW_API_KEY }}.txt",
            )

            submit_sitemap_to_index_now(authentication,
                "https://example.com/sitemap.xml", endpoint=SearchEngineEndpoint.YANDEX)