Microsoft Bing published an announcement stating that the IndexNow search crawling technology is a powerful way for ecommerce companies to surface the latest and most accurate shopping-related information in AI Search and search engine shopping features.
Generative Search Requires Timely Shopping Information
Ecommerce sites typically depend on merchant feeds, search engine crawling and updates to Schema.org structured data to communicate what’s for sale, new products, retired products, changes to prices, availability and other important features. Each of those methods can be a point of failure due to slow crawling by search engines and inconsistent updating which can delay the correct information from surfacing in AI search and shopping features.
IndexNow solves that problem. Content platforms like Wix, Duda, Shopify and WooCommerce support IndexNow, a Microsoft technology that enables speeding indexing of new or updated content. Pairing IndexNow with Schema.org assures fast indexing so that the correct information surfaces in AI Search and shopping features.
IndexNow recommends the following Schema.org Product Type properties:
“title (name in JSON-LD)
description
price (list/retail price)
link (product landing page URL)
image link (image in JSON-LD)
shipping (especially important for Germany and Austria)
id (a unique identifier for the product)
brand
gtin
mpn
datePublished
dateModified
Optional fields to further enhance context and classification:
category (helps group products for search and shopping platforms)
seller (recommended for marketplaces or resellers)
itemCondition (e.g., NewCondition, UsedCondition)”
Read more at Microsoft Bing’s Blog:
IndexNow Enables Faster and More Reliable Updates for Shopping and Ads
Related: The Future Of SEO In The Age Of AI
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Paper piper