specification: API Commons Rate Limits
specificationVersion: '0.1'
schema: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/interface-research/main/schema/api-commons.yml#/$defs/RateLimits
provider: PowerReviews
providerId: powerreviews
created: '2026-05-04'
modified: '2026-08-13'
generated: '2026-08-13'
method: searched
source: https://developers.powerreviews.com/Content/Read%20API/Use%20Cases.htm
note: >-
  Replaces the 2026-05-04 bulk-sweep scaffold, which asserted per-tier
  requests-per-minute quotas and X-RateLimit-* headers that PowerReviews has
  never published. The values below are the provider's own published limit plus
  the response headers actually observed on a live probe of
  readservices-b2c.powerreviews.com on 2026-08-13.
tags:
  - E-Commerce
  - Ratings and Reviews
  - User Generated Content
  - Retail
  - Rate Limiting
description: >-
  PowerReviews publishes one rate limit, in prose, on the Read API use-cases
  page: more than 1,800 requests from a single IP address within a five-minute
  window blocks that IP for five minutes, and the block is extended while the
  excessive traffic continues. Enforcement is an IP block, not a throttled
  response — the API returns no RateLimit-* headers, no Retry-After, and no 429,
  so there is no runtime signal a client or agent can read before it is cut off.
  PowerReviews' documented mitigation is to cache Read API responses rather than
  call the API on each page load.
limit_count: 1
headers:
  limit: null
  remaining: null
  reset: null
  retryAfter: null
  policy: null
  observed: '2026-08-13'
  observed_note: >-
    A live unauthenticated GET against
    readservices-b2c.powerreviews.com returned only CloudFront and standard
    security headers (x-frame-options, x-content-type-options, x-xss-protection,
    via, x-amz-cf-id, x-amz-cf-pop, x-cache). No rate-limit family header of any
    kind was present.
responseCodes:
  throttled: null
  note: >-
    No 429 is declared in either Swagger document and none was observed. The
    documented enforcement is an edge IP block, which presents to a client as a
    connection-level failure rather than an HTTP status.
limits:
  - name: Read API per-IP request ceiling
    scope: ip-address
    metric: requests
    limit: 1800
    timeFrame: 5 minutes
    window: fixed
    burst: null
    enforcement: ip-block
    block_duration: 5 minutes
    escalation: >-
      The block is reassessed after five minutes and continues while calls remain
      above the configured threshold.
    effective_date: '2019-11-04'
    applies:
      - PowerReviews Read API
    source: https://developers.powerreviews.com/Content/Read%20API/Use%20Cases.htm
  - name: Write API
    scope: null
    limit: null
    note: >-
      PowerReviews publishes no rate limit for writeservices.powerreviews.com.
      The Write API use-cases page states only that content submission from
      high-volume merchants is isolated from general online submission and from
      low-volume merchants.
    source: https://developers.powerreviews.com/Content/Write%20API/Use%20Cases.htm
pagination_limits:
  note: >-
    Not a rate limit, but the published hard bounds on result retrieval that
    govern how fast a corpus can be walked.
  max_page_size: 25
  min_page_size: 1
  max_offset_window: 10000
  rule: paging.size + paging.from must not exceed 10000
  source: https://developers.powerreviews.com/Content/Read%20API/Use%20Cases.htm
policies:
  - name: Cache rather than call
    description: >-
      PowerReviews explicitly recommends caching the API response instead of
      calling it on each page load, both to speed page rendering and to stay
      under the per-IP threshold.
    source: https://developers.powerreviews.com/Content/Read%20API/Use%20Cases.htm
  - name: Escalation path
    description: >-
      Consumers hitting the limit are directed to PowerReviews Technical Services
      rather than to a self-service quota increase.
gaps:
  - no RateLimit-* or Retry-After response headers
  - no 429 status on exhaustion
  - no per-key or per-merchant quota published
  - no rate limit published for the Write API
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com