## **🧭 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**

1. **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.
2. **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.
3. **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.
4. **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.