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: TEGNA
providerId: tegna
created: '2026-05-04'
modified: '2026-08-13'
generated: '2026-08-13'
method: probed
source: >-
  Live response headers observed on https://www.tegna.com/wp-json/ and https://api.premion.com
  on 2026-08-13. The 2026-05-04 scaffold values were removed on 2026-08-11 (roadmap#35); this
  revision replaces the remaining prose with what was actually measured.
reconciled: true
tags:
  - Broadcasting
  - Media
  - Digital Advertising
  - OTT
  - Content API
  - Rate Limiting
description: >-
  TEGNA publishes no rate limits for any API surface, and returns no rate-limit signal at
  runtime. This is a measured zero, not an unchecked gap: response headers were captured from
  live 200, 400, 401 and 404 responses on both publicly callable hosts and none carried a
  limit, a remaining count, a reset time or a Retry-After.
limit_count: 0
sources:
  - https://www.tegna.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts
  - https://api.premion.com/api
observed_headers:
  ratelimit_standard: absent      # RateLimit-Limit / RateLimit-Remaining / RateLimit-Reset (RFC 9239 draft)
  x_ratelimit_legacy: absent      # X-RateLimit-Limit / X-RateLimit-Remaining / X-RateLimit-Reset
  retry_after: absent
  exhaustion_status: not observed
  present_instead:
    - {name: cache-control, value: "max-age=600, must-revalidate"}
    - {name: x-cacheable, value: "SHORT on 200 collections, non200 on errors"}
    - {name: cf-cache-status, description: Cloudflare edge cache disposition}
    - {name: cf-ray, description: Cloudflare request id — the only per-request correlator}
limits:
  - name: Undocumented edge protection
    scope: unknown
    metric: unknown
    limit: not published
    window: not published
    notes: >-
      Cloudflare fronts both www.tegna.com and premion.com, and WP Engine sits behind it, so
      edge throttling almost certainly exists. Nothing is advertised to a client, so an
      integrator cannot distinguish a throttle from an outage, and cannot back off correctly.
  - name: Hard parameter ceiling (not a rate limit, but the only published bound)
    scope: per-request
    metric: records per page
    limit: 100
    window: per request
    notes: >-
      per_page is capped at 100 by the route index and enforced with a 400 rest_invalid_param /
      rest_out_of_bounds. Values above the cap are rejected rather than clamped. This is the
      only quantitative bound TEGNA's API actually publishes, and it bounds page size, not call
      rate.
policies:
  - name: No published throttling policy
    description: >-
      TEGNA documents no per-second, per-minute, per-key or per-account limit for any surface,
      and operates no developer portal where one could be published.
  - name: Partner platform governance (advertising surface)
    description: >-
      Programmatic and audience-data integrations for AudienceOne and Premion are transacted
      through third-party DSP/SSP/DMP platforms. Any throttling there is set by the partner
      platform, not published by TEGNA.
  - name: Crawler policy is stricter than API policy
    description: >-
      robots.txt on both www.tegna.com and premion.com disallows GPTBot and ChatGPT-User
      entirely and sets Crawl-delay 10 for everyone else. The JSON APIs themselves apply no
      user-agent restriction — every probe in this pass succeeded with a browser user agent.
maintainers:
  - FN: Kin Lane
    email: kin@apievangelist.com