Cloudflare, Inc., the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, announced it will work with Microsoft, Yandex, and other leading search engines to help businesses get the most timely and relevant search results to their customers. By participating in the IndexNow.org initiative, Cloudflare will allow websites to automatically notify search engines whenever content is created, updated, or deleted so they can be more efficiently crawled. Now, all Cloudflare customers can ensure users see the most up-to-date version of their content, all with a single click.

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Search engines use a complex network of bots to crawl the ever-changing content on the Internet so people can find relevant, timely content. Today, approximately 45% of Internet traffic comes from web crawlers and bots. To help improve the efficiency of crawlers on the web, Cloudflare launched Crawler Hints–an easy way to signal to bot developers when content has been changed or added to a site, so they can make more efficient choices about what to crawl. What’s more, website owners will be able to improve site performance by reducing unnecessary bot traffic and to provide timely content, which ultimately helps improve search rankings. Now, Cloudflare is using the IndexNow standard to bring Crawler Hints to major search engines.

“A fast, reliable website and timely search results are at the heart of any growing business, whether it’s a startup or Fortune 500 company. Since the beginning, we’ve worked to help our customers to give them the speed, reliability, and security they need to do business,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “Today, we’re taking that one step further by working with Microsoft and other major search engines to help any website owner reduce inefficiencies while also delivering their users reliable, relevant and timely online experiences.”

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Cloudflare’s global network spans more than 250 cities in over 100 countries and powers millions of Internet properties. Now any Cloudflare customer can opt into Crawler Hints–for free–with a single click in their dashboard to automatically begin sending hints to search engines when content has been changed on their site.

“The cache data from CDNs is a really valuable signal for content freshness. Cloudflare, as one of the top CDNs, is key in the adoption of IndexNow to become an industry-wide standard with a large portion of the internet actually using it,” said Fabrice Canel, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Bing. “Cloudflare has built a really easy 1-click button for their users to start using it right away. Cloudflare’s mission of helping build a better internet resonates well with why we started IndexNow, that being to build a more efficient and effective search.”

“Yandex is excited to join IndexNow as part of our long-term focus on sustainability,” said Maxim Zagrebin, Head of Yandex Search. “We have been working with the Cloudflare team in early testing to incorporate their caching signals in our crawling mechanism via the IndexNow API. The results are great so far.”

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