SEO Tool · Replaced

Free Search Engine Submission

For most of the 2000s this page hosted a script that fired your URL at hundreds of small search engines and directories. Almost none of those engines exist any more, and the two that matter — Google and Bing — both ignore old-style submission. Here's the modern process that actually gets pages indexed, and the API call that pings Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver in a single request.

What changed

Mass-submission services made sense when there were dozens of independent crawlers and most of them needed a manual nudge. Today, four engines cover the entire English-speaking long tail: Google, Microsoft Bing (which also feeds Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and a long list of resellers), Yandex and Naver. Each has its own first-party submission channel and ignores the third-party submission farms entirely. Most of those farms now exist only to place affiliate links or harvest emails.

The three things to actually do

  1. Submit a sitemap to Google Search Console. Verify the property (Domain property is best — covers every subdomain and protocol), paste the URL of your XML sitemap into the Sitemaps screen, and let Google discover the URLs from there. For individual pages, the URL Inspection tool's "Request indexing" button is the modern equivalent of submission.
  2. Submit the same sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools. Verify, add the sitemap, and use "Import from GSC" to skip the verification step entirely. Bing covers Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and Brave Search.
  3. Send your URLs to IndexNow. One HTTPS POST notifies every IndexNow-compatible engine at once — Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and several smaller players. It's free, has no quota, and the engines treat the ping as a strong re-crawl signal. See the snippet below.

IndexNow in one cURL command

Generate a 32-character hex key, host it as a plain-text file at https://yourdomain.com/<key>.txt (the file's only contents must be the key itself), then POST your changed URLs: 

curl -X POST 'https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
    "host": "yourdomain.com",
    "key": "your32charhexkey",
    "keyLocation": "https://yourdomain.com/your32charhexkey.txt",
    "urlList": [
      "https://yourdomain.com/page-one",
      "https://yourdomain.com/page-two"
    ]
  }'

A 200 OK means the URLs are queued. Up to 10,000 URLs per request. Re-POST whenever a URL changes — that's the whole protocol.

What about Google's submission API?

Google had an Indexing API but restricted it in 2022 to JobPosting and BroadcastEvent structured data only. For everything else, the supported channels are Search Console sitemaps and the URL Inspection tool. Workarounds that hit the Indexing API for general content typically get the URLs deindexed once Google notices, so they're not worth the risk.

What about the long-tail engines?

Baidu and Sogou (China) and Naver (Korea) have webmaster consoles of their own. If you don't target those markets, skip them — content there is filtered by jurisdiction and language, not submission. Everything else (Mojeek, Marginalia, Stract, Kagi's index) crawls organically; you don't submit.

Why this page exists at this URL

The original /free-search-engine-submission tool served around 411,000 visits before the rebuild. The slug has inbound links from across the web going back twenty years — retiring it would lose all of that. Instead, the URL now explains the modern equivalent of what used to live here.

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