On each poll cycle, Pingmap fetches your sitemap, compares it against the last snapshot, and submits the difference to IndexNow.
The poll cycle
- Fetch — Pingmap requests your sitemap URL. For sitemap index files, it fetches the index first, then each child sitemap in parallel.
- Parse — The XML is parsed into a list of URLs with their
<lastmod>timestamps (if present). - Diff — The current list is compared against the snapshot from the previous poll.
- Submit — New and changed URLs are batched and submitted to
https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow. - Store — The current snapshot replaces the previous one.
What counts as "new or changed"
A URL is submitted if:
- It wasn't in the previous snapshot (newly added page)
- Its
<lastmod>timestamp changed since the last poll
If a URL is in both snapshots with the same <lastmod>, it's skipped. If your sitemap doesn't include <lastmod> at all, only newly added URLs are submitted — updates to existing pages won't be detected.
Adding <lastmod> to your sitemap is worth doing. Most platforms include it automatically.
Poll intervals
Your plan determines the minimum poll interval:
- Free — manual polls only (on-demand via the dashboard)
- Paid — automatic polling, configurable per site
Shorter intervals mean faster indexing after a publish, at the cost of more requests to your server. For most sites, polling every 15 to 30 minutes is enough.
Submission batching
IndexNow accepts up to 10,000 URLs per request. Pingmap batches submissions to stay within that limit. If a single poll finds more than 10,000 new URLs, they're submitted in multiple requests.
What gets logged
Every poll run is recorded in the dashboard:
- Poll start time and duration
- Number of URLs fetched from the sitemap
- Number of URLs submitted (new + changed)
- Number of URLs skipped (unchanged)
- HTTP status code from the IndexNow endpoint
- Any errors (fetch failure, parse error, submission error)
You can inspect individual runs from the site's history tab.