The Hard Limit: 200 Requests Per Day
Each GCP (Google Cloud Platform) project's service account is limited to 200 Indexing API requests per day. This quota resets at midnight Pacific Time. There is no way to request an increase from Google — it applies to all service accounts equally. For the full API setup context, see our Google Indexing API guide.
On top of the daily limit, there is a per-minute burst limit of approximately 600 requests, though most users hit the daily cap long before encountering the rate limit.
What Counts as a Request?
Each call to urlNotifications:publish counts as one request, regardless of whether the URL was actually indexed. Submitting the same URL twice uses two requests. Submitting a URL that no longer exists still uses a request.
Why 200/Day Is a Real Problem
For a personal blog or small site, 200 submissions per day is more than enough. For any organization at scale, it becomes a bottleneck quickly:
- An e-commerce site with 50,000 products: 250 days to submit everything once
- A news publisher with 40 articles per day: nothing left for re-submissions or updates
- An agency with 20 clients: fewer than 10 submissions per client per day
The Pool Service Account Solution
The most effective way to scale past the 200/day limit is to use multiple GCP service accounts — each with its own 200/day quota — and route submissions across them automatically. This is called pool SA rotation.
The math is simple: 5 service accounts = 1,000 submissions/day. 10 SAs = 2,000/day. The complexity is managing the rotation, tracking which slots are exhausted, and handling the case where a slot runs out mid-batch.
Indexaro's pool system handles all of this automatically. You upload service account keys, and the platform routes submissions across available slots, detects quota exhaustion in real time, and bumps to the next slot without manual intervention. Or skip the GCP setup entirely with a managed Google indexing service that includes pool rotation out of the box.
Other Strategies for Managing Quota
If you cannot immediately expand your SA pool, prioritize submissions strategically:
- New content first — pages that have never been indexed
- High-commercial-intent pages — product pages, landing pages, pricing
- Time-sensitive content — news articles, promotional pages, event pages
- Pages targeting competitive keywords where freshness matters
Deprioritize: pages already indexed that haven't changed, archive content, and pages with thin content that Google is unlikely to index anyway.
Common Quota Mistakes
- Submitting URLs blocked by robots.txt — wasted requests that Google ignores
- Submitting noindex pages — Google crawls but won't index them
- Resubmitting unchanged pages repeatedly — once per meaningful update is sufficient
- Not tracking which URLs have already been submitted today
For high-volume catalogs, pair pool rotation with bulk URL indexing so you prioritize new and updated pages without burning quota on duplicates.