🧭 Overview
If your keyword research API returns a quota_exceeded error with a limit of 0, but your dashboard shows thousands of lookups remaining, your account may have experienced a temporary quota sync issue. This is a known platform behaviour that can occur when the quota system fails to write correctly. In most cases, the fix is quick and does not require a plan change.
⚠️ What Causes This
A mismatch between your API-reported quota and your dashboard quota can happen when a background quota sync fails. Your actual entitlement remains intact on the account — the API simply reads an incorrect value at that moment. A recent engineering fix addressed a root cause of this type of failure, but transient sync issues can still occur.
🛠️ Steps to Resolve
- Confirm your quota is genuinely available. Open the platform and check your keyword research usage. Navigate to the relevant section of your dashboard to verify that lookups are shown as available for your plan.
- Wait 2–5 minutes, then retry your API call. Quota sync issues are often self-correcting within a short window. Re-send the same API request that returned quota_exceeded and check whether it succeeds.
- Clear any cached API credentials or tokens on your end. If your integration caches authentication tokens or quota state locally, clear that cache and reinitialise the connection before retrying.
- Retry the API call a second time. In the confirmed case underlying this article, the API began working correctly as soon as the customer tried again after the account was reviewed. No configuration change was required — the quota state corrected itself.
✅ Confirming the Fix
A successful API response — returning keyword data rather than a quota_exceeded error — confirms that the quota is now syncing correctly. Your remaining lookups should continue to decrement as expected from that point forward.
📋 Additional Notes
- This issue affects the keyword research API specifically and is not related to other Search Atlas API endpoints.
- Your plan entitlement and purchased quota are not lost during a sync failure — the lookups are preserved on your account.
- If you use CSV upload for keyword research and notice that a lookup was consumed but returned no data, this is a separate known issue. Contact support so the team can review and restore the affected quota.
💬 Still Seeing the Error?
If retrying does not resolve the quota_exceeded error and your dashboard continues to show available lookups, a member of our team can review your account and manually trigger a quota correction. If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type human teammate to be connected with a member of our team.