Three domains, three submissions, three confirmed handshakes on 11 July 2026:
Domain A — submitted 01:57:17. Bing validated the key file at 01:57:19 (2 seconds). YandexBot began crawling the submitted URLs at 02:00:46 (3 min 27 sec).
Domain B — submitted 02:57:36. Bing validated at 02:57:37 (1 second). YandexBot fetched robots.txt at 02:58:07 (31 seconds) and swept roughly 35 pages in the following 85 seconds across ~15 parallel workers.
Domain C — submitted 02:55:26. Bing validated at 02:55:29 (3 seconds). Yandex spun up a ten-worker fleet reading robots.txt at 03:04, and began its page sweep at 04:14 — about 70 minutes later.
IndexNow is a shared protocol with a specific membership: Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver. Submitting a URL does not notify Google, and it does not notify any AI crawler. GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot arrive on their own cadence and cannot be summoned. On the domain observed, GPTBot visited twice in twenty-four hours. There is no push mechanism that reaches it.
A push channel into two search indexes, at a latency measured in seconds rather than days. That is real and it is free. What it does not buy is control over AI crawler arrival — which remains, as far as we can measure, entirely theirs.