Website Submission Sites: Search Engines First, Then Directories

Website submission: two jobs with one name

Search engine submission and directory submission share a verb and little else. When you submit a site to a search engine, you tell its crawler which URLs exist and when they change; the engine decides whether to crawl and index them, and nothing is published about you. When you submit it to a directory, an editor or a script reviews what you sent and publishes a listing: a page on the directory's domain with your name, your description and a link to your site.

The second job feeds the first. Google's SEO starter guide says so plainly: "Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled. In many cases, these are other websites that are linking to your pages." A listing on a directory Google already crawls is one of those other websites. The old lists of site submission sites put both jobs on one page, a hundred search engines beside a few hundred general directories, and what became of the general directories is a story of its own.

Do you have to submit a new website to search engines?

No, though it helps a site that nothing links to yet. Google's guide to how Search works opens on the point: "In fact, the vast majority of pages listed in our results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but are found and added automatically when our web crawlers explore the web." Its help for Search Console adds that you don't have to sign up for it to be included in Google's results. A sitemap still earns its place on a new site: Google's recrawl page says one "can be very helpful if you just launched your site". So submit a new website to search engines once, with a sitemap, and let links do the finding after that.

How to submit your website to Google

To submit a website to Google Search you work in Search Console, which its help describes as "a free service offered by Google". You prove the site is yours first: the Sitemaps report wants owner permissions on the property, and asking for a page to be indexed wants an owner or a full user. After that there are two ways in, a sitemap for the whole site and URL Inspection for one page.

Submit your website sitemap to Google

A sitemap is a file that lists the URLs on your site you want crawled, and some content management systems generate one for you, as Google's starter guide notes. Google's limit is 50MB uncompressed or 50,000 URLs per file; a bigger site splits the list into several sitemaps, which a sitemap index can submit in one go. How to submit a website to Google Search Console, step by step:

1. Post the sitemap on your site. Google recommends the root, where one file can cover every URL on the site.
2. Check that Googlebot can fetch it: run a live URL inspection on the sitemap's address and look for a successful page fetch.
3. Open the Sitemaps report, paste the address into Add a new sitemap and press Submit.
4. Add a Sitemap line with the same address to your robots.txt. Google picks it up on its next read of that file, and Bing reads the same line.

Google is careful about what this buys. Its sitemap guide calls submitting one "merely a hint", and the Sitemaps report help explains the verb: a submission "means telling Google where to find the file on your site. You cannot actually upload a sitemap to Google."

Submit a website URL to Google for indexing

For a page you want crawled soon, a new pricing page or a fixed one, URL Inspection is how you submit a website for indexing one URL at a time. Type the full URL into the inspection bar at the top of Search Console, wait for the result and press Request indexing; a page that passes a quick check joins the indexing queue. Two limits apply. Requests have a daily cap per property, and Google's recrawl page warns that "requesting a recrawl multiple times for the same URL won't get it crawled any faster".

Then wait. The same page says "Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks" and that "Requesting a crawl does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all." One more rule on it matters later in this post: "You can't request indexing for URLs that you don't manage."

How to submit your website to Bing

Bing Webmaster Tools is Bing's counterpart, and its own page invites you to "Get started for free". The quickest start is the import: sign in, choose to import your sites from Google Search Console, and Bing's help says the sites you pick "will be added and get automatically verified in Bing Webmaster Tools", with their sitemaps brought across. You can also add a site by hand and verify it with an XML file, a meta tag or a DNS record. Then there are three ways to submit a website to Bing:

• A sitemap, in the Sitemaps tool or as the robots.txt line Google reads too. Bing calls sitemaps "an excellent way to tell Bing about URLs on your site that would be otherwise hard to discover by our web crawlers", and says they are typically read once a day.
• Submit URLs, by hand: up to 10,000 URLs per domain per day, one per line, with the quota reset at midnight UTC. The URL submission help adds: "Repeated manual submissions do not accelerate indexing."
• IndexNow, which Bing puts ahead of both: "Bing recommends using IndexNow for faster, automated URL submission across participating search engines."

IndexNow: one notice for every engine that takes part

IndexNow is a protocol rather than a dashboard. You place a key file on your site, a string of 8 to 128 characters saved as a text file at the root, then send the URLs you added, changed or deleted. Its documentation states the deal between the engines: "Search engines adopting the IndexNow protocol agree that submitted URLs will be automatically shared with all other participating search engines." So one notice reaches every member. Many platforms send the notices for you: the IndexNow FAQ lists WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Drupal among the systems with native or plugin support, and names Cloudflare among the CDNs.

On 28 October 2026 the list of participating engines on indexnow.org named Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver, Yep, the Internet Archive and Amazonbot. Google is not on it, which is why the Search Console step stays. Like every route on this page, IndexNow is a request and not a promise; its FAQ says "Submitting a URL does not guarantee immediate indexing."

Submit your website to Yahoo and the other search engines

Yahoo's help page on submitting a website gives one instruction: "Submit your site via Bing Webmaster Tools." It adds that Yahoo cannot give status updates on submissions to Bing, and that "it can take 6 to 8 weeks or longer for your content to show up in the Yahoo Search results". DuckDuckGo runs a crawler of its own, DuckDuckBot, and its help page on sources says of the more traditional links and images in its results: "which we largely source from Bing". A Bing submission therefore covers Yahoo by Yahoo's own instruction, and feeds the index DuckDuckGo draws its links largely from.

Submitting a website to all search engines comes down to three free steps for the main ones, engine by engine:

A few engines still take a URL through a form of their own. Active Search Results is one: two fields, a URL and an email, and we submit there too, as an index submission. What a submission produces there is a record in its index, not a page about you and not a link.

Submit your website to search engines for free

Every step above costs nothing, and at Google paying adds nothing. Search Console is free, Bing Webmaster Tools is free and Bing describes IndexNow as "a free, open-source protocol". Google's guide to how Search works settles the paid version in two sentences: "Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, or rank it higher. If anyone tells you otherwise, they're wrong." So submit your website free of charge through the tools above, and keep the budget for the kind of website submission that does cost something: listings on other people's sites.

Search engine submission sites: what the old lists do not do

Several of the pages that rank for this search are lists of search engine submission sites, one of them promising a hundred or more. Two things undercut them. The first is discovery: by Google's own account, most of what it shows was never submitted by hand. The second is the ping. The sitemap protocol let anyone notify an engine with an unauthenticated request, and in June 2023 Google announced it was retiring its endpoint, because "these unauthenticated sitemap submissions are not very useful". It went further: "In fact, in the case of Google Search, the vast majority of the submissions lead to spam."

The same post is clear that old tools do no harm: "Any existing code or plugins which use this endpoint will not cause problems for Google Search; you don't need to make any changes (but using the endpoint will also not do anything useful)." Its header now reads that the deprecation is complete, and it says pings to the old address result in a 404 error. What a search engine does not do, whichever list or tool sends it your URL, is answer a submission the way a directory does: with a page about your site on somebody else's domain and a link to it.

Website submission sites that list you with a link

That page and that link are what directories offer, for a fee, for a badge or for nothing. Each listing is a path to your site from a page Google already knows, and one more referring domain in your profile; how many of those it takes is a question of the pages ranking above you. Below are the 30 strongest website submission sites in our catalog that have a guide on this site, by Domain Rating, with the link type and badge rule our catalog records and what each submission asks of you. The name of each one links its guide.

Read the last column next to the DR. 16 of the 30 have a free route that asks nothing of your site, and 8 of those carry the no-equity mark: measured listing by listing, they pass nothing, however strong the domain. 13 make a free listing depend on their badge or a link to them, and none of them carries the mark. Of the 19 rows recorded dofollow with no mark, 13 want that badge or link. On these sites the followed link and the badge mostly come as a pair.

The strongest of them show how the trade works. Startup Fame (DR 84), Twelve Tools (DR 83) and Findly.tools (DR 82) give a free listing to sites that carry their badge or a link to them. AI Toolz Dir (DR 69) wants a plain text link to it on your site before you submit, and charges $25 once for a listing with "No backlink on your site needed". Before you take that trade, see how the five kinds of free listing compare and whether a link back is a fair trade.

Through Submitator, the badge half of that trade is ours. Every badge and link back your directories want is served from a single Submitator component on your site, and from then on each one staying live is on us. A redesign has that one component to carry over instead of a snippet per directory, and no directory on your list ever costs you a commit of its own. Uneed (DR 76) is the reverse case: nothing asked of your site, but a free queue that has closed for weeks at a time when it was full. Through us you can always launch there.

For the rest of the catalog, the whole list in four tables, by link type, prints every directory we submit to, and the AI tool and SaaS pages cut it by kind of product. Directories are one source of links among several; our companion post on where else free links come from reads the link on article platforms, communities and profiles as well. For a directory that is on none of these pages, our DR checker looks up its rating for free.

Site submission at scale, minus the forms

Our smallest plan is 30 directories, and by hand that is 30 forms. Each directory has its own fields and its own description length, a queue of days or of months and, on the badge directories, a snippet in your code that has to outlast every redesign. The kit every form draws on is the same each time, and some forms ask for nothing but a URL and build the listing out of your meta tags, which the link preview checker prints as a scraper sees them. If you would rather hire the forms out, we ranked the services that take them on on a separate page.

Submitator takes those forms off your hands. You pick the directories in our dashboard, where each one shows its DR, and we file every form. No two get the same description: each is written for its directory instead of pasted from the last form. Whatever badge or link back a directory wants, we place it and keep it up. Most directories are delivered in 24 to 48 hours, every directory within 21 days at most. If a directory rejects a submission, by default you get one more directory to pick in its place. A refund can be requested within 30 days of purchase, on the conditions in our terms.

Plans are one-time: $29 for 30 directories, $49 for 60 and $79 for 100. All Directories is $149 for the whole catalog, with directories we add later included; a rejection there is recorded with its reason, since the selection is already everything. A directory enters our catalog once a submission to it has run end to end, which is why the catalog table holds 160+ directories rather than thousands.

After you submit: getting the listings crawled

Remember the rule from Google's recrawl page: you can't request indexing for a URL you don't manage. A listing lives on the directory's domain, so Google reaches it the way it reaches any page there, through that site's own links and sitemap. Every Submitator plan includes free indexing by IndexMachine ($25 value) for that wait. When a listing goes up, check two things about the link to you, its target and its rel. The steps for reading a rel are written up separately, and the four checks we run on a directory link cover the rest.