Kishan,
Following is my today’s chat with Claude further to your last remarks re Citing Agent
With regards,
Hemen Parekh
I wrote :
“ Hey Bro : Here is latest feedback from Kishan > Yeah, it was useful. One thing I noticed, though, is that Claude suggested hosting a key file on our domain. However, our blogs are hosted on the myblogepage.blogspot.com subdomain, which is owned by Google, so we can’t host a key file there. That said, I found a workaround and ended up integrating directly with the Bing Indexing API instead of using the IndexNow API. // Any comments ?”
Claude replied :
“ Kishan's right on the facts, and his workaround is a good call — but it's surfaced something bigger than a plumbing detail, Bhai. Let me take it in three parts.
He's correct, and the reason is worth naming. IndexNow's key file must sit on the host whose URLs you're submitting, and it must serve only the key as plain text. Blogger gives you neither: you can't upload a raw .txt at the root of a Google-owned subdomain, and you can't prove ownership of blogspot.com. There's no clever fix. My Part B quietly assumed www.hemenparekh.in was the home — that assumption was mine, and he caught it. Good catch.
His workaround is legitimate. Bing's URL Submission API authenticates by apikey + verified site ownership rather than a key file, so it sidesteps the problem entirely — a successful submission returns HTTP 200, and if the URL meets Bing's guidelines it gets crawled and indexed in real time. And critically, it hits the same Bing index ChatGPT Search and Copilot draw from, which was the whole point. So nothing strategic is lost. What is lost is small: IndexNow would have fanned one call out to Yandex, Seznam, Naver and Yep as well. For an India-focused policy corpus, that's a rounding error. Fine trade. Seoutils
Two practical things to check today, though:
- Quota. This is the one that bites silently. Bing's submission API has daily and monthly caps — you can call GetUrlSubmissionQuota to see your remaining allowance, and the documented example shows a daily quota under 1,000 with a monthly around 11,000. If his daily cap is a few hundred, 6,800 URLs did not all go through — the tail just failed. Have him run the quota check and confirm how many were actually accepted versus attempted. If capped, spread the back-catalogue over several days and keep the daily bot for new posts only. Microsoft Learn
- Verification. The API only works on a site verified in Bing Webmaster Tools. For blogspot that means the meta-tag method (paste into the Blogger theme's <head>) or importing from Search Console. If he's submitting successfully, this is presumably done — worth a 10-second confirm.
Now the part I'd genuinely stop on. The key-file failure isn't really a key-file problem — it's the §2 canonical decision resurfacing, the one open item we've flagged since the first spec and never closed. If we're indexing myblogepage.blogspot.com URLs, then blogspot becomes the URL an AI cites. Which means: the citation trophy points at the lower-authority domain you don't own; Stage 4's llms.txt has nowhere to live (root files need root control); and the "entity layer" we discussed last week — the Person schema, the sameAs links, the coherent picture of Hemen Parekh, the prior-art author — can't be assembled on a host you can't touch. Every one of those blocks traces back to the same root cause.
The good news is Blogger isn't a dead end. Settings → Crawlers and indexing → Custom robots.txt lets him paste Part A's allow-list straight in, and Blogger auto-generates a sitemap. So the door can be opened on blogspot today. But that's a floor, not a home.
So the fork you and I have circled twice now finally has to be settled, and it's a question only you can answer:
Where do the blogs actually live in public — and where should an AI's link point? If the answer is "hemenparekh.in is the real home," then Path A is the clean move: make .in the Blogger custom domain, and Blogger will 301 the blogspot URLs across, rewrite the canonicals, and hand you root control — which restores IndexNow, llms.txt, the entity layer, and the authority, all in one action. If the answer is "blogspot is where the blogs genuinely live and .in is the digital-twin archive," that's a valid choice too — but then we accept blogspot as the citation home and I'll re-cut the specs around it honestly.
Everything downstream hangs off that one answer, Bhai. What's your call — is .in the home, or is blogspot?
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