Accepted isn't indexed: what an IndexNow response tells you
IndexNow answers in milliseconds. Here is what a 200 or 202 promises, what it doesn't, and why Google never sees it.
Submit a URL to IndexNow and the answer comes back almost before you finish the request. It is tempting to read that 200 as “done”. It means something much narrower, and the gap between the two is where most indexing confusion starts.
What IndexNow is
IndexNow is a protocol for telling search engines that URLs on your site were added, updated or deleted. You prove you control the host by serving a key file (for example /your-key.txt), then send the URLs to api.indexnow.org or to any participating engine. Engines share what they receive with each other, so one submission reaches all of them. Participants include Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Seznam.cz, Naver and Yep.
What the response codes mean
200 OK: the URLs were submitted successfully.202 Accepted: the URLs were received, and validation of your key is still pending.400 Bad Request: the request is malformed.403 Forbidden: the key isn't valid, usually because the key file is missing or doesn't contain the key.422 Unprocessable Entity: the URLs don't belong to the host, or the key doesn't match the protocol's format.429 Too Many Requests: you are sending too much, too fast.
None of these codes says anything about crawling. The best one tells you the engine has your hint.
Accepted, crawled and indexed are three separate events
Accepted means an engine received the notification. Crawled means a bot later fetched the page, on a schedule the engine sets, or not at all. Indexed means the engine decided to keep the page and can show it in results. Ranking is a fourth thing again. Each step can stall without any error being raised in the step before it.
That is why IndexCyborg keeps them in separate columns. A notification is shown as Accepted, with the reminder that acceptance isn't indexing. Whether a page is indexed is only ever taken from the search engine itself.
Google doesn't use IndexNow
Google is not an IndexNow participant, so notifying IndexNow does nothing for Google Search. For Google, the channels are your sitemap, internal links and Search Console's Request indexing. Google's Indexing API exists, but it is documented only for job posting and livestream pages.
IndexCyborg covers Google separately: it asks the URL Inspection API what Google knows about each page, and the Chrome extension clicks Request indexing in your own Search Console session. How that works.
When IndexCyborg sends notifications
Only after you verify the domain (a DNS TXT record or an HTML file) and the IndexNow key file is reachable. From then on, new and changed URLs found in your sitemaps are notified automatically. Every submission and the engine's response code land in the activity log, so you can see exactly what was sent and when.