Grav IndexNow Plugin: automatically submit pages to search engines

⚡ In short

Grav has no IndexNow plugin in its official catalog. This homemade plugin fills the gap by automatically submitting modified URLs to api.indexnow.org on every page save — whether through the Grav admin or the MCP plugin — no manual intervention, no cron job, no external dependency.

Source code available on GitHub:

• 🔌 Plugin: jmrGrav/grav-plugin-indexnow

🧠 Why

IndexNow is an open protocol that instantly notifies compatible search engines (Bing, Yandex) when a page is created or modified. Without it, search engines wait for their next crawler pass — which can take hours or days.

Several reasons motivated this development:

• No native plugin: unlike WordPress or Shopify, Grav has no IndexNow plugin in its catalog
• Cloudflare Crawler Hints already active but limited to cache invalidations — not content modifications
• Full control: explicitly submit all 3 URL variants (/route, /fr/route, /en/route) on every save
• Traceability: every submission is logged in grav.log with the returned HTTP code

🔧 What was done

📁 Plugin structure

A minimal Grav plugin consists of 3 files:

/var/www/grav/user/plugins/indexnow/
├── indexnow.php          ← main logic
├── blueprints.yaml       ← admin field definitions
└── indexnow.yaml         ← default values

🔍 Finding the right admin hook

The first obstacle was identifying the Grav event triggered when saving a page in the admin. The onPageSave hook — intuitive but nonexistent — doesn’t work. Searching the source code revealed the right candidate:

grep -rh "fireEvent(" /var/www/grav/system/src/ | sort -u
# → onAdminAfterSave emitted by AdminController.php after each successful save

⚙️ Plugin code

public static function getSubscribedEvents(): array
{
    return [
        'onAdminAfterSave' => ['onAdminAfterSave', 0],
        'onMcpAfterSave'   => ['onMcpAfterSave', 0],
    ];
}

🐛 Bug 1: $this->config() vs $this->grav['config']

The $this->config() method in a Grav plugin returns an array, not a Config object. Calling ->get() on it causes a fatal error:

// ❌ Wrong — returns an array, not a Config object
$config = $this->config();
$key    = $config->get('plugins.indexnow.key');

// ✅ Correct
$config = $this->grav['config'];
$key    = $config->get('plugins.indexnow.key');

🐛 Bug 2: MCP plugin bypasses the admin hook

After initial testing, a problem appeared: pages created or modified via the MCP plugin (create_page, update_page) did not trigger onAdminAfterSave. This hook is only emitted by PageObject.php in the admin context — programmatic calls via MCP bypass it entirely.

Diagnosis:

# No fireEvent in the MCP plugin
grep -r "fireEvent" /var/www/grav/user/plugins/mcp-server/mcp-server.php
# → (no results)

# onAdminAfterSave conditioned on isAdminSite()
grep -r "onAdminAfterSave" /var/www/grav/system/src/Grav/Common/Flex/Types/Pages/PageObject.php
# → if ($this->isAdminSite()) { $grav->fireEvent('onAdminAfterSave', ...) }

Solution — custom onMcpAfterSave event:

Rather than reusing onAdminAfterSave (which requires a PageInterface object not always available after an MCP write), a custom event was added directly in the MCP plugin after each successful operation:

// In mcp-server.php — helper added after toolCreatePage and toolUpdatePage
private function notifyPageSaved(string $route): void
{
    $grav = \Grav\Common\Grav::instance();
    $grav->fireEvent('onMcpAfterSave', new \RocketTheme\Toolbox\Event\Event([
        'route' => $route,
    ]));
}

The IndexNow plugin listens to this event and extracts the route directly from the payload:

public function onMcpAfterSave(Event $event): void
{
    $route = $event['route'] ?? null;
    if (!$route) return;
    if (in_array($route, self::EXCLUDED_ROUTES, true)) return;
    if (str_starts_with($route, '/tag')) return;

    $this->submitToIndexNow($route);
}

✅ Final result — two contexts covered

📋 IndexNow key file

The key file must be publicly accessible at the site root:

curl -I https://arleo.eu/bf6faf5563914fe7bb18d429976b182d.txt
# → HTTP/2 200

✅ Verification in logs

tail -f /var/www/grav/logs/grav.log | grep -i indexnow
# [IndexNow] ✅ Submission OK (HTTP 200):
# https://arleo.eu/fr/grav-plugin-indexnow,
# https://arleo.eu/en/grav-plugin-indexnow,
# https://arleo.eu/grav-plugin-indexnow

🏁 Conclusion

The plugin now covers both modification contexts: the Grav admin via onAdminAfterSave and the MCP plugin via the custom onMcpAfterSave event. Every save triggers an immediate submission of all 3 URL variants to IndexNow, with full traceability in grav.log. Bing indexing time drops from several days to a few minutes.

To go further:

• 💡 Add a bulk submission on plugin startup to index all existing pages in a single request
• 💡 Extend submission to other IndexNow-compatible engines (Naver, Seznam) via their dedicated endpoints