Cloudflare Crawler Hints automatically sends IndexNow when a response from the zone is a cache MISS (a sign that the content changed), available on every plan including Free; responses of 4xx and above are not reported.

The question I started with

I measure how AI apps read websites, and the first rung is always the crawler. If a bot has not fetched your page, the app has nothing to say about it. Bingbot is one of the crawlers I watch most closely, and on my lab site it visits regularly but takes only a handful of pages a day.

So my question was simple. When I change a page, how long until Bing knows?

There is a way to announce it: IndexNow. You submit the changed URL, and the participating search engines share it with each other (IndexNow documentation). The catch is that someone has to write the code that submits. On small sites, nobody does.

What I read on 21 October

On 21 October 2026 I read Cloudflare's Crawler Hints documentation. Four points:

• Cloudflare "can proactively tell a crawler" when content changes, and it uses IndexNow to do so.
• Its signal that content "has likely been updated" is a response with cache status MISS: the cached copy is gone and Cloudflare had to go back to the origin.
• Responses with error codes of 4xx and above are not reported.
• It is available on all plans.

So the submission code nobody writes is replaced by one toggle in the dashboard. It looked almost too easy.

Where I hesitated

Then I thought about my own site. The lab site runs on a Worker and does not go through the cache, so almost every response could look like a MISS or a dynamic response. How much would Crawler Hints send in that case? Would IndexNow treat the volume as spam? The documentation does not say.

It cuts the other way too. As I read the docs, a page whose cache simply expired, with nothing changed, could still be reported as updated. The switch reports cache events, not edits.

I have not yet checked whether Crawler Hints is currently on or off for my own zone. That is next.

What you can do

1. Open the cache settings for your zone and see whether Crawler Hints is on.
2. If it is, remember that it reports cache events. For pages that bypass the cache, it is unclear what gets counted.
3. If you already submit IndexNow yourself, the two channels may overlap. The documentation is silent on that.
4. If you run a shop with many dynamic pages, ask "how much will this send?" before you turn it on.

How sure is this

This is an external-source claim: it rests only on what Cloudflare documents, not on anything I measured. The docs do not say Bing gives Cloudflare's signal more weight than one you send yourself, and they give no figures for how quickly Bing comes back after a notification; the limits section below spells that out. Once I turn it on for my zone and can see whether Bingbot returns sooner, the numbers will go on the pw research pages.