What this check inspects
When you supply your IndexNow key, Shipwork fetches /<key>.txt and checks that it returns exactly the key. If it does, it posts the URL to the public IndexNow endpoint with the host, key and key location, and reports the response status: accepted, rejected for a bad key, rejected for a bad URL or host, or rate limited.
What a failure means
A missing or mismatched key file is an error. The endpoint returns 403 for a key it cannot verify and 422 for a URL or host it will not accept, both errors. A 429 is a warning that you are submitting too often. Without a key, the check reports the setup step it needs rather than guessing.
How to fix it
- Place the key file at the site root: https://yourdomain.com/<key>.txt, not in a subfolder and not served as HTML.
- The file must contain the key and nothing else, with no extra whitespace or markup.
- Submit only URLs whose content changed. Bulk submission of unchanged URLs earns rate limiting.
- Use the same key that is in the file, exactly, including case.
A typical failure, worked through
The setupA developer places the key file at /indexnow/<key>.txt because that folder name made sense, and configures submissions to point there.
What the check reportsThe check fetches /<key>.txt, gets a 404, and reports the key file missing before it ever submits. IndexNow would have rejected the submission with 403 even if the request had been sent.
The pointThe key location must be one of the two paths IndexNow recognises. A file in the wrong folder is the same as no file.