IndexNow and Sitemap Monitoring for Fresh AI Answers

An AI assistant is only as good as the content it can ground on. New releases, pricing updates, and policy changes can go stale fast if your crawler only checks weekly. IndexNow and disciplined sitemap monitoring give you quick freshness without breaking polite crawling rules.

Start with sitemaps

• Always fetch sitemap.xml or a sitemap index first. Respect robots.txt directives before you queue links.
• Normalize URLs to avoid duplicate embeddings caused by trailing slashes, casing differences, or tracking parameters.
• Track discovery per tenant so multi-tenant crawls never blend queues.

Add IndexNow as a fast lane

• When your CMS or site generator publishes a change, send an IndexNow ping with the changed URLs.
• Store those URLs in a small priority queue so the crawler refreshes them ahead of the normal schedule.
• Keep retries with jitter so you do not flood the endpoint if their API hiccups.

Run incremental recrawls

• Use Last-Modified headers and ETags to decide whether to fetch the body again.
• Diff normalized text to see if any sections changed. If only boilerplate shifted, skip re-embedding to save cost.
• If a page returns a soft 404 pattern, log it and consider downgrading its weight in retrieval until it stabilizes.

Keep embeddings versioned

• Stamp each chunk with embedding model version, checksum, and crawl run ID.
• When content changes, hard delete the old chunks for that URL and insert the new ones so retrieval never mixes versions.
• Track freshness metadata in MongoDB Atlas and filter stale chunks out of top results.

Alert before users notice staleness

• Define a stale page ratio threshold (five percent is a solid start). If you cross it, alert ops via chat and email.
• Include Page URL, last successful crawl time, and error reason in the alert so triage is quick.
• Watch answer feedback too. A spike in “outdated” flags is a useful early signal that you need a refresh.

How CrawlBot handles freshness

• Sitemap-first crawling with polite QPS and backoff to protect origin sites.
• IndexNow ingestion to pull in changes quickly without breaking cache friendliness.
• Scheduled incremental crawls plus a stale ratio alert to keep freshness under control.
• Versioned embeddings in MongoDB Atlas Search so you can trace any answer back to the crawl that produced it.

Staying fresh is not about crawling harder. It is about listening for change signals, prioritizing politely, and keeping your index tidy so the assistant answers with confidence.