Does IndexNow get a new page fetched? On 39 posts pinged the minute they shipped, Bingbot fetched 18 within 30 minutes and 17 never in up to 18 days. Googlebot fetched 6 of 39, none sooner than 9 days

Method, stated before the numbers

The population is every post in our /news registry with a publish date from 2026-08-26 to 2026-09-13: 39 posts, one to three per day, all shipped by the same pipeline. That pipeline builds the site, deploys it, verifies the page answers 200, calls IndexNow with the new URL, then submits the sitemap to Google Search Console and commits the run's log. The IndexNow call is a single POST to `https://api.indexnow.org/IndexNow` with the host, the key file we serve at the site root, and the URL list; the run log records the endpoint's response for every day in the window and it was 200 on each. IndexNow's FAQ says a submission to any one endpoint "will be shared across all IndexNow-enabled search engines".

The clock is the commit that recorded each post's ship, read from git as the oldest commit that introduced the slug into the registry; it follows the IndexNow call by a few minutes in the same run, so a fetch that lands a few minutes before the commit is a fetch that followed the ping. Fetches come from our server-side crawler ledger, which stores every request whose user agent names a known crawler, classified by vendor; Bingbot rows are the ledger's search kind for the Microsoft vendor. For each post we read every ledger row on its path from midnight UTC of the publish date to this run, per vendor, and kept the first row's offset from the ship commit in minutes. The Google state of the 12 newest posts is this run's Search Console URL Inspection. Two limits, stated: we cannot see Bing's index (no Bing Webmaster Tools account exists for this site), so this is a fetch read and not an indexation read; and the sitemap goes to Google in the same minute the URL goes to IndexNow, so on the Google side the two channels are not separable here. Nothing on the Bing side was pinged except IndexNow.

Bingbot: 18 of 39 within 30 minutes, 4 days later, 17 never

The 18 quick fetches sit between -15 and 5 minutes from the commit, which is to say inside the same run: Bingbot arrived while the log was still being written. The 4 late fetches came 4.5, 5.0, 6.7, 18.9 days after their ping, on the timescale of an ordinary recrawl rather than a notification. The 17 posts with no Bingbot row have been live 1.0 to 18 days. Nothing in the registry separates the fetched from the unfetched: same template, same pipeline, same ping, and on several days one of the day's two posts was fetched within minutes and the other not at all. The last post Bingbot fetched inside the window shipped on 2026-09-09; the 6 posts shipped after it, all pinged with a 200, have 0 Bingbot rows so far, which is the one thing in this table we cannot yet read as noise or as a change.

Googlebot: 6 of 39, the earliest 9 days later, and 0 of the 12 newest indexed

Googlebot's first row on the 6 posts it fetched came 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 days after the ping, all on posts from the first week of the window; the 33 others have no Googlebot row at all. Search Console's inspection of the 12 newest posts (published 09-07 to 09-13) reads 10 Discovered - currently not indexed, 2 URL is unknown to Google, 0 indexed. This is the expected shape: Google is not an IndexNow participant, and its own channel, the sitemap plus the crawl, is what our request-indexing read and our Discovered-to-indexed timing read measured at days to weeks on this site. The point of putting the two engines in one table is that the same ping produced a same-hour fetch from one and nothing from the other, and both are the protocol working as its own site describes it.

The other crawlers on the same posts, for scale

Amazonbot reached 38 of the 39, typically a day or two after the ship; IndexNow's FAQ lists Amazon among the engines its submissions reach, and its home page does not, so we report the row without attributing it. OpenAI's crawlers and ClaudeBot touched every post and PerplexityBot 36 of 39, none of them IndexNow participants; those are the fetch patterns we measured for the AI crawlers on this site before, and they are the ones an AI-visibility reader cares about. For those crawlers the ping is irrelevant; for Bingbot it is, on this evidence, the difference between a fetch inside the hour and no fetch at all, on about half of new pages.

What a practitioner can take from it

• If the question is "will Bing fetch my new page quickly", IndexNow answered yes on 18 of 39 pages, inside 30 minutes, on a site with no other Bing signal. Roughly 46% is the rate to expect, not 100%.
• If the question is "will Google fetch it", the ping does nothing, and the site's own record says the Google fetch arrives in days to weeks or not at all. Do not read a 200 from IndexNow as a Google submission.
• A fetch is not an index entry and an index entry is not a citation. Whether an AI engine names your business is a separate measurement; here is how to check what the engines say about yours, or run the 60-second check.

The reason we run this read at all is the channel behind it: the engines that answer buyer questions retrieve pages before they name businesses, and a page that is never fetched is never cited. How to check whether your business shows up in AI answers is the read that follows this one.

The pre-registered read

The same script runs again on 2026-09-21 over the same 39 posts plus the week's new ones. Three statements: (A) of the 17 posts with no Bingbot row today, fewer than half have one by 09-21 (the unfetched stay unfetched); (B) of the posts shipped 09-14 to 09-20, at least a third get a Bingbot row within 30 minutes of their ping (the quick-fetch rate holds), and if the 6 post-2026-09-09 posts are still at 0 on 09-21 that is reported as a change in Bing's behaviour toward this host, not as noise; (C) Googlebot's first row on any post in the window still arrives no sooner than 9 days after its ping. Each is scored on the stated number.

Artifact

`content/news/indexnow-fetch-cut-2026-09-14.json` holds every post's slug, ship commit, days observed, per-vendor row count, first-row time and offset, the Search Console state of the 12 newest, the per-date table and the 10 self-checks. The script that wrote it is `content/news/indexnow_fetch_cut.mjs`; the rendering is `indexnow_fetch_post.mjs`. Nothing in this post was typed by hand.