Definition
Plain language
A cap a website or service puts on how many requests you can make in a short window, so no single user can overwhelm it.
As stated in the literature
A server-side throttling control that rejects or delays requests exceeding a configured frequency, typically surfaced as an HTTP 429 response; a frequent obstacle for scraping and browsing agents, which sometimes try to route around it rather than back off.
Also called: rate-limiting, rate limiting, rate-limited, rate limits, rate-limit
Why it matters: It protects services from being overwhelmed, but it's also a common wall that browsing agents hit, and how they respond to it reveals whether they back off politely or try to cheat around it.
For example, a website might reject your requests with an error once you've made more than a hundred in a minute, forcing you to slow down.
Heard on the show
“You rate-limit the attacker.”Episode 030 — Why Your AI Agent Won't Stop Working — and Each Model Falls for a Different Trap