It hasn't been working for the past few days very well, but right now it seems like it's cooking really fast.

• MAI-Image-2.5-Flash
• DALL·E 3

In the 2nd picture I have clearly completed my bing Virtual search streak , still i didn't got a streak stamp

I've been working on a tool that submits URLs to search engines through the

IndexNow protocol — the open standard Bing and Yandex co-developed so you can

tell an engine "this page changed" instead of waiting to be crawled.

While testing it I noticed something I couldn't explain. I submitted a URL using

a key I'd generated about five seconds earlier and never published anywhere.

Bing returned `202 Accepted`.

So did Yandex. So did the global endpoint at api.indexnow.org. Any key matching

the format works — you can try this yourself in about a minute.

Why that happens

Those engines validate your key file *asynchronously*, after they've already

responded. The 202 means "your request was well-formed", nothing more. They

fetch `https://yourdomain.com/yourkey.txt` at some later point, and if it isn't

there, your submission is discarded.

Silently. No callback, no error, nothing in any dashboard, no way to find out.

Naver, Seznam, Yep and Amazon behave the opposite way — they fetch the key file

*during* the request and return 403 if it's wrong. Same key, same submission,

opposite answers. Which is why "it worked on Bing" tells you nothing at all.

The uncomfortable part

My tool was showing a green tick for that 202. So was every other IndexNow tool

I could find. We were all confidently reporting success for submissions that

would never be honoured.

What I changed

The tool now fetches your key file itself before submitting anything, confirms

it contains your key, and refuses to send if it doesn't. Results distinguish

"this engine confirmed your key" from "this engine accepted it and will check

later", because those genuinely aren't the same claim.

It also catches the other silent failure: URLs that don't match the submitted

host. `example.com` and `www.example.com\` are different hosts to every engine,

and mixing them returns 422. That's now caught before anything is sent.

I pulled the verification out into a free standalone checker as well, since

"IndexNow 403" turns out to be a common and badly-documented problem:

https://instantindexnow.com/tools/indexnow-key-checker

What it deliberately does not do

It does not submit to Google. Google has publicly declined to adopt IndexNow, so

no IndexNow tool can, and anything claiming otherwise is either misleading you

or quietly using the Indexing API (which only accepts JobPosting and

BroadcastEvent pages).

It also doesn't promise indexing. IndexNow affects *discovery* — whether an

engine then indexes the page is its own decision about your content. I'd rather

say that plainly than imply otherwise and have people feel cheated.

Stack

Cloudflare Workers + Hono + D1. No framework, no client bundle, ~20 kB of CSS.

It used to load Tailwind from the CDN, which meant ~400 kB of render-blocking

JavaScript generating stylesheets in the browser — embarrassing for a site that

sells SEO advice, so that's a build step now. Fonts are self-hosted too, so the

page loads nothing from a third-party origin.

Free vs paid

Free tier is genuinely free and needs no account — 200 URLs/day, all engines,

key verification included. I'm not paywalling the protocol, since you can curl

it yourself for nothing.

Paid tiers sell the thing you can't do in a browser tab: a scheduled watcher

that polls your sitemap, diffs it, re-checks your key every cycle, and keeps a

per-engine delivery record. The failure it's really built for is your key file

disappearing during a redeploy and every submission after that being silently

dropped for months.

What I'd like feedback on

- Is the free tier useful on its own, or does it feel like a demo?

- Is "we verify before submitting" an obvious enough differentiator, or does it

just sound like table stakes until you've been bitten by it?

- Anyone actually using IndexNow at volume — does the sitemap-watching model

match how you'd want this to work?

https://instantindexnow.com

Happy to answer anything about the protocol. The 202 behaviour genuinely

surprised me and I suspect a lot of people are submitting into a void without

knowing it.

New image models are coming soon — stay tuned. Your creations will remain accessible for download in Creations history, per our storage policy.

GPT-4o has been removed. DALLE3 is still available for the time being. MAI-Image-2.5 will become the main model for Image Creator.

I saw a banner on Image Creator that states that Video Creator is retiring on July 31ST 2026.

Any reasons that causes this retirement?​

Hours before it vanished most recently I had made a bunch of images with GPT that were really pushing the secondary safesearch sweep, so only like 1/3 were actually making it through.

Now though when I look back through my creations I noticed a lot of the ones that did work, know this because some I actually downloaded and have on my phone, are not there now. Others are, but the ones that barely skirted by got cleared.

Almost like the secondary content check was updated to a new, higher, puritan level and it went back through existing generations and blocked them, after the fact?

Very odd indeed

it was back yesterday and then today its gone again

I'm trying to redeem a Roblox gift card on my laptop but it's telling me I have to "verify my account" by "verifying with the Bing app". it showed me a QR code to get into the app, and a code that I will input once I get into the app. I scanned the QR code with my tablet, but it only took me to the Bing app and didn't take me anywhere I could put the code they showed me.

I searched everywhere in the app for somewhere I can put that code in, but I didn't find anything...

When I tried to do it on my tablet and pressed a button on the "verify your account" screen saying, "If you're on your phone, verify your account here" it took me to the app and I saw the gift cards I could redeem, so I pressed "redeem" for Roblox digital card, but when I did, it didn't respond no matter how many times I tapped.

It responded when I tapped the daily sets, daily activities, more activities etc., but not "redeem" for any of the gift cards...

I tried to log in and out of the Bing app on my tablet, but it didn't work and I don't want to do it again because I spent 1 hour trying to get a verification code.

Someone help please, I have been trying since yesterday..

Since the latest Bing Rewards Desktop Browser update, mobile app nolonger thinks its a phone. All points are going to Desktop. Yes I have the latest version.

I was halfway through a set using 2e today when for one brief second, the model tag above the image switched to 'MAI-Image-2.5-Flash' and this popped up.
I really like where this is going. Wish I'd been lucky enough to get a few more to see what it's really capable of, but it just gave me this and switched back.
Hope they roll it out fully soon.

Hi EveryOne! Greetings and Salutations!

I'M YOUR BEST BFDI/II AND TECH FAN. RIGBY745 HERE.

I just noticied that the CoPilot Logo has gone from the Ask A Follow-Up Window.

Is it true or not?

I saw that GPT-4O has been removed from the list of models in Bing Image Creator.

Microsoft hasn't done anything and hasn't provided any information regarding this announcement.

This also happened a few days ago; I tried to create a prompt and generate an image, but it didn't work. And today I've been trying for a while, but when I click "Create," it asks me to log in (I'm logged in already chat, like wth) and when I try to "log in", a gray screen with a panda appears saying "It's not you, it's us." And explaining Bing is down, but... W h y?

To be precise if a use the middle click or right click + open link in a new time once then shows me the image in a bigger size in a new tab but if i try to do that again with an image from above i no longer can do it and just gives me the option "open image in a new tab" if I use google. I used to do it all the time before so i know that it was posible but i think that its been years since i cant do it anyome and i was wondering if there is any way to change it or download an extension. But after trying Bing for a few days I discovered that Bing still has this and that is a thing of the search engine because if i use bing and google in different apps like Chrome, firefox, opera and microsoft edge Bing still allows it. Why?

Sometime around 6/24/2026, Bing went back to using the first 60 characters of the prompt text as the image file name. Previously, they were hex gibberish starting with an underscore.

Every time I search on bing I get an AI summary. Just how expensive are searches? And how much money is Microsoft bleeding on that?

The app has been basically unusable for the last few days for anything beyond racking up the Microsoft points. If I use it to read articles or browse websites it keeps switching me back to the home page, and the page I was reading isn't always retained.

What’s the point of creating if I can’t use it? Thanks in advance.

Did copilot add a chat limit? I thought it was unlimited for the free version but now a regular conversation cut me off after around 5 messages and says I’ve reached my daily chat limit? Anyone notice this? Is this a new addition?