429 429 Too Many Requests

When you'll see it

When a client sends too many requests in a given time and hits a rate limit: an API quota, a login throttle, or a crawler going too fast.

What to check

• The Retry-After header, and wait at least that long.
• Add exponential backoff to your client rather than retrying at once.
• On your own site, that the limit doesn't catch real crawlers. Repeated 429s make Googlebot slow down.
• Whether many users share one IP, for example behind a company network or a NAT.

Example response

HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Retry-After: 60
Content-Type: application/json

SEO impact

If Googlebot gets 429, it slows down crawling. Persistent 429s can prevent pages from being crawled and indexed.

At a glance