sitemap ping

For nearly two decades, "pinging" search engines was the canonical way to notify them about a new or updated sitemap:

GET https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://example.com/sitemap.xml
GET https://www.bing.com/ping?sitemap=https://example.com/sitemap.xml

The endpoints accepted any URL, returned 200 OK, and the search engine would queue a crawl. Many SEO tools, plugins, and CI pipelines still implement this.

Google deprecated it in 2023

In June 2023, Google announced they were removing the ping endpoint. The reasoning:

• The endpoint had become a spam target.
• Sites pinged on every build, every minute, with <lastmod> values that didn't reflect actual changes.
• Google's actual scheduling already relied on <lastmod> and authority, making the ping signal redundant.

Pinging google.com/ping now returns 404 or 410. Pings are silently dropped. Tools that still do it aren't doing anything useful for Google.

Bing still accepts it (sort of)

Bing's /ping endpoint technically still responds, but the Bing team has been clear that you should use IndexNow instead. Pinging Bing's /ping is best-effort and may be deprecated similarly.

What replaced it

Common mistakes (still happening in 2026)

• SEO plugins still pinging the dead endpoint. Many WordPress and CMS plugins emit pings on every save. Harmless but wasteful.
• Believing pings affect crawl frequency. They never did, and now they don't even reach Google.
• Confusing "ping" with "submit." Sitemap submission via GSC is a different mechanism that does work.

What SitemapHost does

SitemapHost does not ping deprecated endpoints. For Google, we use the GSC Sitemaps API (OAuth) when you connect your account. For Bing and others, we use IndexNow. Both are the modern, supported equivalents.