GhostPulse IndexNow: external IndexNow integration for Ghost
Hi everyone,
I’m sharing GhostPulse IndexNow, an external service that adds IndexNow URL submission support to Ghost publications.
It connects to Ghost through a standard custom integration/API/webhook setup and submits URLs to IndexNow-compatible search engines when posts or pages are published or updated.
The service has already been tested on high-frequency publishing Ghost sites, with more than 20,000 URLs submitted through IndexNow so far.
Main features:
automatic IndexNow URL submission for Ghost content
From what I can see, Ghost’s IndexNow integration currently seems to be a private/alpha feature flag rather than a stable user-facing feature exposed in Ghost Admin. I’m on Ghost 6.43.1 and I don’t see it in Labs, so I assume it still requires direct configuration and is not yet a fully supported public feature.
I originally built GhostPulse IndexNow because I needed this functionality for my own Ghost sites, especially for high-frequency publishing sites where faster URL discovery is useful. After implementing it for my own use case, I made it available as an external managed option.
GhostPulse IndexNow is meant as an external managed layer: no direct Ghost config changes, no theme modification, submission logs, endpoint fallback, and monitoring outside the Ghost instance.
Of course, once Ghost ships IndexNow as a stable feature available to all Ghost users, this specific external service will probably no longer be needed. Until then, it may be useful for hosted setups, non-technical publishers, or anyone who wants a managed IndexNow layer today.
I cannot speak for the Ghost team, but I have recently had a conversation where it sounded like it is very close to being released.
It is normal for new features to be released as “private” first.
You can activate it by setting labs.indexnow to true (or labs__indexnow if you’re using Docker).
On Magic Pages this is running sine its release and has been tested. Quite honestly, if you’re self hosting and want to use that functionality, I’d rather argue that a simple configuration change is a lot easier than adding additional infrastructure.
Once this is released into general availability (which, I assume, is just a matter of weeks) labs.indexnow becomes a no-op, whereas an additional infrastructure component needs to be torn down, in order to avoid duplication.
When I built this integration, I did it very impulsively: I needed IndexNow for my own Ghost sites, so I implemented it without even checking properly whether something similar was already planned in core.
If the official Ghost implementation becomes generally available in the next few weeks, I’ll probably retire the newborn public service, because at that point it would no longer make sense to suggest an external tool for something Ghost already does natively.
That said, I may still keep using it personally. I currently manage five Ghost sites, and having all the submission stats in one place is still useful to me.