SerpAPI Capacity and Rate-Limit Control

Overview

Use the account's live contract as the source of truth instead of embedding plan names or numeric limits in code.

Prerequisites

• Workload arrival rate, burst size, latency objective, search budget, and job priority
• Access to the Account API and ownership of all workers sharing the key
• Metrics for attempts, successes, cached results, 429s, latency, and searches left

Tool Discipline

Use Read, Glob, and Grep to inventory producers and retry loops, WebFetch to verify current Account API and status semantics, Write or Edit for admission controls and observability, and Bash(python3:*) for an approved capacity check or load simulation.

Current Contract

Account API returns fields including plan_searches_left, total_searches_left, this_hour_searches, and account_rate_limit_per_hour. HTTP 429 can mean the hourly throughput limit was exceeded or the account ran out of searches, so the response alone does not identify the remedy.