Guide

Pinging Google is not a thing any more

If you came here looking for google.com/ping?sitemap=, it no longer works. Google announced its deprecation in 2023 and switched it off; Bing retired its anonymous equivalent too. The good news is that you lost nothing.

What happened, and what to do instead

Why was it removed?

Google's stated reason was that the endpoint was overwhelmingly used by automated tooling re-pinging unchanged sitemaps, and it had no measurable effect on crawling. It was a no-op dressed up as an action, so it was retired.

So how does Google learn my sitemap changed?

It re-fetches sitemaps on its own schedule. You help it by declaring the sitemap in robots.txt and submitting it once in Search Console. Neither needs repeating — a submitted sitemap stays submitted.

What if I need something faster?

For a specific URL, use URL Inspection → Request Indexing, or the Indexing API for automation. Both are real signals rather than a ping. See every submission method.

Is there still a ping-style protocol anywhere?

Yes — IndexNow is essentially what pinging should have been: an authenticated, per-URL change notification. It works for Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver. Google does not participate.

My plugin still pings on every publish. Is that a problem?

Not a harmful one; the request simply fails or is ignored. It is worth turning off so you are not reading success from a call that does nothing, and worth checking whether that plugin's other indexing advice is equally out of date.

Replace the ping with something that reports back.

We submit each URL through the channels that still exist, then measure whether it indexed. 25 free.

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