I recently learned about IndexNow: a simple standard for notifying search engines^[1] that you've got new content they should index. If you only post an average of 5 times a year, it probably makes more sense to use cURL to submit your one URL to their basic API. But I like to automate things, and I'd already written a standards compliant WebSub Subscriber for AWS Lambda and SNS, so I thought I'd write another little Lambda function to bridge that one to IndexNow.

IndexAtomNow is as simple as I could make it. It processes an SNS notification containing the kind of Atom fragment WebSub gives you, extracts the URLs from each <entry> element, and submits them to IndexNow. It doesn't have much error handling, or useful logging yet, but it does the job, and at a rate of 5 invocations a year, runs well within Lambda's free tier.

When I publish this post to my static but TLS-enabled site using S3 and CloudFront, I'll also notify my WebSub Hub^[2], which will notify my subscribed WebSubscriber instance, which will forward the notice to my IndexAtomNow instance, which will use my configured key to notify IndexNow, like a proper Rube Goldberg machine^[3].

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1. Not including Google, which has ~90% market share 🤷, but at least including Bing which has like ~4%. ↩︎

2. I haven't found a nice way to integrate that into my Hugo deployment configuration yet. ↩︎

3. Ahem! "Serverless microservices architecture." 😉 ↩︎