Most people who have IndexNow enabled think it’s working. The plugin says it’s active. Pages are being published. Nothing looks broken. But if you check the IndexNow history log in your RankMath settings — Dashboard → IndexNow → History — there’s a good chance you’re looking at a column of 429 responses stretching back weeks, and your pages are not getting into Bing anywhere near as fast as they should be.
I’ve seen this on multiple client sites. A 1,200-page legal site. A HubSpot-based B2B technology company. In both cases, IndexNow was “on”, and in both cases, it wasn’t actually doing what anyone thought it was doing.
What IndexNow actually is — and why it matters
IndexNow is a protocol that lets you ping Bing directly when a page is published, updated, or removed. Instead of waiting for Bing’s crawler to find the change on its own timetable, you send a signal and Bing processes it quickly. In principle it’s a significant improvement over relying on sitemaps alone.
The reason it matters beyond just Bing is this: ChatGPT Search and Microsoft Copilot both retrieve from Bing’s index. If your pages aren’t in Bing, they can’t appear in Copilot recommendations or ChatGPT Search responses. For any business trying to build AI visibility, a broken IndexNow setup is a Layer 2 failure — the retrieval layer — that makes everything else harder. It’s the plumbing. Fix it first.
What a 429 means and why you’re probably getting them
A 429 is an HTTP status code that means “too many requests”. Bing is telling your site to slow down. You’ve submitted the same URL, or too many URLs, too quickly — and Bing has put you in a temporary rate-limit window.
The most common cause in WordPress is WP-Cron combined with RankMath’s auto-submit setting. Here’s the chain: RankMath has IndexNow auto-submit enabled. WP-Cron is set to run frequently. Something triggers a re-save or a scheduled task. The same URLs get submitted again. And again. Bing sees what looks like a spam loop and applies a cooldown. The cooldown is typically 24 hours, sometimes slightly longer if the pattern is aggressive enough. And because nothing on the WordPress side shows an error — the plugin is working, it’s submitting — most people don’t know this is happening.
How to check if this is happening to you
In WordPress with RankMath: go to Dashboard → RankMath → IndexNow → History. You’ll see a table of every IndexNow submission with the response code. 200 and 202 are successes. 429 is the problem. If you’re seeing repeated 429s, especially for the same URLs, you’ve found it.
In Bing Webmaster Tools: go to IndexNow in the left sidebar. You’ll see the URLs Bing has received and their status. If you’re only seeing one or two URLs submitted (often just the homepage, often via Cloudflare) and nothing else, that’s a sign the rest of your submissions are either failing or not being sent at all.
If you’re on HubSpot, the situation is different. HubSpot sends IndexNow pings automatically via Cloudflare’s integration, which is why the homepage often gets indexed promptly. But HubSpot’s native integration is limited — it doesn’t reliably push content pages, product pages, or blog posts. Those are relying on Bing’s regular crawl, which is slower and less consistent.
The fix for WordPress
Step one: disable auto-submit in RankMath. Go to RankMath → General Settings → IndexNow and turn off automatic submission. This stops the loop immediately.
Step two: wait out the current cooldown. If you’ve been getting 429s, Bing has applied a rate limit. Don’t submit anything for at least 24 hours from the last 429. Submitting during the cooldown window extends it.
Step three: when the cooldown clears, test with a single URL. Not a bulk submission — one URL. Submit it manually through RankMath’s Submit URLs interface. Check the History tab for a 200 or 202 response. If you get that, you’re clear.
Step four: submit your priority pages in controlled batches — ten to twenty at a time, not hundreds at once. The pages that matter most for Bing indexing are your key service pages, recent news or announcements, and any pages you’re actively trying to get into AI responses via ChatGPT Search or Copilot. The rest will follow via sitemap crawl on a normal schedule.
Step five: consider leaving auto-submit off and handling IndexNow submissions selectively. For most sites, the highest-value use of IndexNow is submitting a handful of important new pages promptly — not triggering a submission on every minor edit or scheduled cron task. Manual or selective submission is more reliable than auto-submit for exactly this reason.
The fix for HubSpot
You can’t install a plugin, so the approach is different. Log in to Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap directly if you haven’t already — Settings → Sitemaps. Then use Bing’s URL Inspection tool to manually submit your highest-priority pages. This bypasses IndexNow’s rate limiting entirely and gets Bing to crawl those specific pages on request. It’s not as fast as a working IndexNow setup but it’s reliable, and it’s the right tool for a platform where you don’t have plugin-level control.
What this doesn’t fix
Getting IndexNow working correctly means Bing knows your pages exist and can access them. That’s Layer 2 of the AI Discovery Stack — retrieval. It’s the foundation. But it doesn’t mean you’ll appear in Copilot or ChatGPT recommendations. That’s Layer 4 — recommendation eligibility — and it’s determined by entity corroboration, content structure, and trust signals that are separate from technical indexing. The analogy I use: IndexNow gets your pages into the library. Whether the librarian recommends your book is a different question entirely.
Fix the plumbing first. Then build the rest. If you want to understand what Layer 4 actually requires and whether your site is leaking there, that’s what the Bing and AI Visibility guide covers in detail — including why Bing specifically is the index that matters for ChatGPT Search and Copilot, and what the full indexing-to-recommendation sequence looks like.
