Throttling requests to the Bing Web Search API

Warning

On October 30, 2020, the Bing Search APIs moved from Azure AI services to Bing Search Services. This documentation is provided for reference only. For updated documentation, see the Bing search API documentation. For instructions on creating new Azure resources for Bing search, see Create a Bing Search resource through the Azure Marketplace.

The service and your subscription type determine the number of queries per second (QPS) that you can make. Make sure your application includes the logic to stay within your quota. If the QPS limit is met or exceeded, the request fails and an HTTP 429 status code is returned. The response includes the Retry-After header, which indicates how long you must wait before sending another request.

Denial-of-service versus throttling

The service makes a differentiation between a denial-of-service (DoS) attack and a QPS violation. If the service suspects a DoS attack, the request succeeds (HTTP status code is 200 OK). However, the body of the response is empty.

Next steps