URL Inspection API limits: 2,000 inspections per property per day
The URL Inspection API gives you Google's own answer to "is this page indexed?", but only within a budget. Google documents a limit of 2,000 inspections per day for each property, plus a per-minute cap. If you plan around those numbers, the API covers most needs for your own site. If you ignore them, the check stops halfway through the list.
The documented limits
Google's usage limits page for the Search Console APIs lists the following quotas for URL Inspection:
- Per site: 2,000 queries per day and 600 queries per minute.
- Per project: 10,000,000 queries per day and 15,000 queries per minute.
"Site" here means the Search Console property you pass in the siteUrl field. The project limits are set so high that the per-site limit is the one you will meet first.
The scope rule that matters more than the quota
The reference for the urlInspection.index.inspect method says the inspected URL must be under the property specified in siteUrl. In practice that means:
- you can inspect any URL on a domain you have verified in Search Console;
- you cannot inspect pages on other domains — guest posts, directory listings, profiles or any other backlink source;
- requests need an OAuth scope of
webmastersorwebmasters.readonly, granted by a user with access to that property.
So the 2,000-per-day question only applies to your own pages. For third-party URLs the limit is effectively zero, and you need a different tool. One option is described in this API reference for checking index status of any URL list.
Planning 2,000 inspections a day
Two thousand a day is about 14,000 a week. For a blog or a small store that is more than enough to inspect every page regularly. For a large catalogue it is not, so you need to decide which URLs earn a check.
- New URLs first. Pages published in the last few days are the ones most likely to change status.
- Changed URLs next. Pages with new titles, new content or new canonical tags.
- Revenue and landing pages. A rotating sample of the URLs that bring traffic or sales.
- Everything else on a slow cycle. Spread the long tail over weeks instead of trying to cover it daily.
The per-minute cap of 600 means a single burst can use a large part of the daily budget in a few minutes. Pace requests evenly and stop for the day when you reach your own ceiling, rather than letting the API return quota errors.
Reading the result correctly
The inspection result includes an index status section with a verdict and a coverage state. Two details are easy to miss:
- Redirects are not followed. Google's documentation on redirects notes that its inspection tools do not follow them. Inspect the final URL, not the old one that redirects to it.
- A not-indexed result has a reason. Store the coverage state, not just a yes or no, so you can group failures by cause — blocked,
noindex, duplicate, crawled but not indexed.
When the quota is not enough
If your own site produces more URLs than the quota can cover, check whether each Search Console property you have verified reflects how the site is organised. Teams sometimes verify URL-prefix properties for large sections. Google's limits page counts quota per site, but it does not promise that adding properties raises your total, so treat that as something to test on a small scale before relying on it.
The other route is to keep the URL Inspection API for the URLs where its detail matters, and use a bulk checker for simple indexed / not indexed status across the rest. The bulk index check script on this site is built to swap between data sources without changing the rest of the pipeline.
Guides on this site
- Check Google index status without the Custom Search API — the overview and how to choose a method.
- URL Inspection API limits — 2,000 inspections per property per day and the scope rule.
- Vertex AI Search for index checks — what Google's suggested alternative is built for.
- The site: operator as an index check — what it shows and what it misses.
- Bulk index check in Python — a safe script structure with batches and retries.
FAQ
Is the 2,000 limit per property or per Google account?
Google lists it as a per-site quota, where the site is the property in siteUrl. The separate project quota applies to all calls made from one Google Cloud project.
Can I inspect a backlink with the URL Inspection API?
Only if the page is under a property you own. A link on another domain is out of scope.
Sources
https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/limitshttps://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/v1/urlInspection.index/inspecthttps://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects