Why Mid-Sized Brands Should Use IndexNow to Accelerate Organic Search Growth

With large enterprises monopolizing search results and the rapid rise of AI-augmented search platforms, standing out in organic search is getting more difficult for mid-sized companies. But as more and more people go online to buy, organic visibility is of paramount importance to those brands’ bottom lines. 

Here’s the good news: mid-sized brands have a unique opportunity to move faster than larger competitors that may be bogged down by complex website structures and processes. By embracing tools like IndexNow, these companies can carve out space in a shifting search environment and see faster returns from organic channels, without overburdening their already stretched-thin marketing teams.

In this post, we’ll explore how IndexNow can help mid-sized brands improve indexation and diversify organic traffic outside of just Google, ultimately speeding up time to revenue. 

The problem: Mid-sized companies face an uphill search battle

Mid-sized brands operate in a unique space, many large enough to enjoy brand recognition, but small enough that they have limited resources for search optimization. 

These brands must often prioritize initiatives that directly and quickly impact traffic and revenue, which leaves less time for complex technical fixes or efforts that take more time to show ROI (like organic search). 

Due to this prioritization, they may also experience significant technical barriers when it comes to getting their pages ranked: 

• Technical limitations: JavaScript elements require rendering, which can slow bots down significantly. And while traditional search engine bots will render JavaScript (albeit slowly), AI bots won’t, meaning they won’t find content generated via JavaScript, such as product reviews, recommendations, and inventory, and in some instances, the navigation. 
• Internal linking gaps: If your site has poor internal navigation or a large number of broken links, bots will get slowed down or miss pages entirely, preventing them from being indexed. 
• Crawl budget concerns: Bogging down bots wastes their valuable crawl budget, stopping them from discovering other pages and pushing them off your site faster. Search engines prioritize more authoritative sites when they crawl, meaning smaller, less recognized websites can't afford to provide a suboptimal experience to bots.
• Incomplete or outdated XML sitemaps: Providing search engines with incorrect or incomplete information about your site's structure can (again) lead to bots missing important pages, indexing outdated pages, or misunderstanding your website's organization, negatively affecting your content’s visibility not only in the SERPs but on AI platforms as well. Slow (or incomplete) indexation delays the entire path to organic revenue — a delay many mid-sized companies simply can't afford in competitive digital spaces.

Ultimately, if these challenges prevent product pages from being indexed, they can’t rank on traditional search engines or be mentioned in AI search. If they’re not visible, they won't drive traffic, whether from humans or from agents. And without traffic, there’s no revenue.

Why faster indexing matters, especially for e-commerce brands

To that end, by improving the speed with which your pages are indexed, the quicker those pages will have a chance to be visible organically, and the faster you’ll see returns.

For e-commerce companies in particular, faster indexation is essential for getting updated information to potential customers, such as: 

• New product launches: You want newly listed products appearing in search results as soon as possible, decreasing the lag between launch and discovery.
• Price changes, promotions, and seasonal campaigns: Time-sensitive updates, such as short-term discounts to certain products, need to be indexed quickly in order to be found before the promotional period ends. And especially during competitive holiday shopping periods, relying on sitemap-only discovery won’t cut it. 
• Refresh user-generated content: Updated product reviews and testimonials need to go live regularly in order to maintain freshness signals to search engines, and to help users make more informed purchases. 

The solution: Proactive indexing using IndexNow

XML sitemaps alone aren’t enough for mid-sized brands who want to speed up indexation. That’s not to say they aren’t still important, as they remain the guide that crawlers use to navigate your site efficiently, but sitemaps are not immediately crawled whenever a new page of content is added. Depending on the size and authority of your site, search engines may crawl the sitemap daily, every few days, or even every few weeks. 

Rather than waiting for bots to pull updates on their own schedule, you now have the option to inform search engines about the latest content changes to your web pages through tools such as IndexNow. 

IndexNow notifies its participating indexes, including Bing, of your content changes, prompting them to crawl and index that new content. This gives you a jump start on indexing items that may be added, updated, or removed throughout the day, instead of relying on search engine bots to find those updates by themselves. Plus, both Perplexity and ChatGPT use Bing’s index for their search functionality, so improving your indexation with Bing through tools like IndexNow ensures that your content can be surfaced in AI search as well. 

You can use IndexNow to help bots focus on your best content rather than waste their crawl budget on faceted URLs or non-canonical pages. This way, you have more control over what gets indexed, so that priority pages are ranked and discovered faster.

It’s important to note: IndexNow is separate from services like Bing’s URL and Content Submission APIs, though they work toward the same broader goal of faster, smarter indexing.

Do more with less: IndexNow and Botify’s SmartIndex

While IndexNow is a huge leap forward for faster, more efficient indexation, it does have some limitations, including a 10,000 URL limit per request and the need for constant, manual submissions each time you have updates.

To address those limitations, Botify developed SmartIndex, an automated, scalable solution that:

• Automates IndexNow submissions for ongoing updates without the manual lift.
• Improves URL limits, freeing brands from the 10K URL cap on submissions.
• Optimizes what gets submitted, so you're prioritizing the indexation of your most important, revenue-driving content.
• Saves time and resources, letting your team focus on strategic initiatives, not tedious operational work.

Using IndexNow through a service such as SmartIndex ensures that the IndexNow search engines are aware of your most important, updated, and new content, so your team won’t have to weigh the opportunity cost of spending time manually submitting crawl requests. SmartIndex also enables the creation of optimized sitemaps and pushing content straight to Bing to improve indexation and further reduce the load on your team.

SmartIndex integrates with Botify’s full suite of agents and automations, helping mid-sized brands manage, scale, and diversify their organic growth strategies automatically across multiple engines, all without overloading your team.

Get indexed faster for better returns through organic search

Mid-sized brands have a rare opportunity: While larger enterprises adjust slowly to the changing search landscape, with fewer pages, you can move quicker. By implementing workflows to give you more control over indexation, you can accelerate your time to revenue, claim more space in emerging search platforms, and diversify your organic search traffic outside of just Google. 

If you’re ready to improve your brand’s search visibility, but don’t have the internal resources or bandwidth to build a new strategy, Botify can help. Book a consultation with our search experts to get started.

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