Search Console and Bing: verify your site, submit the sitemap and use IndexNow

Published October 9, 2026 by the UTM Builder team at Limner.

Start with Google. A domain property in Search Console is verified with a DNS record, and Bing Webmaster Tools imports the sites already verified there, along with their sitemaps. One record covers both.

Domain or URL prefix

Search Console help says a DNS record (TXT or CNAME) is the only way to verify a domain property. A domain property covers http, https, www and subdomains at once. A URL-prefix property accepts other methods, such as HTML file upload, HTML tag, Google Analytics tracking code or Google Tag Manager container snippet, but it only covers that exact address.

• Go with a domain property. Ads can send people to www, to the bare domain or to a campaign subdomain, and a domain property sees all of them.
• DNS changes can take hours to show up. If verification fails right after you create the record, wait before changing anything again.

Bing without redoing anything

In Bing Webmaster Tools, the My Sites page has an Import option. You sign in with your Search Console account, pick the sites and they arrive verified, with their sitemaps. Bing keeps checking ownership through the Google connection: if that access is revoked, you need to import again or verify another way.

What robots.txt does and doesn’t do

robots.txt tells crawlers what to crawl. Google Search Central is direct about it: it isn’t a way to keep a page out of search results. For that, use noindex or password-protect the page.

• A thank-you page, a test page or an expired campaign page that shouldn’t show up in search gets noindex, not a robots.txt block.
• Don’t use robots.txt to block a page that has noindex. Google’s documentation warns that a blocked page isn’t crawled, so the noindex rule is never read.

IndexNow: who it’s for

IndexNow notifies search engines as soon as a URL is created or changes. The official list of endpoints includes Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yep and Amazon. Google isn’t on it. For Google, the way in is still the sitemap submitted in Search Console.

The key is a text file with 8 to 128 characters (letters, numbers and hyphens). The file name is the key itself followed by .txt, and the content is the key. Published at the root of your site, it should open like this, showing only the key: