# API Pagination and Rate Limits
Status: public
Confidence: medium (0.865) (verified)
Last verified: 2026-06-02
Generation: ai_structured


## TL;DR

API pagination controls how clients traverse large result sets. Rate limits control how fast clients may call the service without degrading reliability or triggering abuse protection.

## Core Explanation

Agents that call APIs need pagination and rate-limit handling as first-class execution logic. A model should not be expected to infer how many pages remain, whether a Link header has a next page, or how to back off after a 429. Robust API tooling exposes pagination cursors, request budgets, retry-after handling, exponential backoff, and maximum page limits in the runtime.

## Source-Mapped Facts

- GitHub REST API documentation says responses with many results are paginated and clients can use the Link header to request additional pages. ([source](https://docs.github.com/rest/using-the-rest-api/using-pagination-in-the-rest-api))
- Stripe rate-limit documentation says Stripe uses rate and concurrency limiters and may return 429 responses when many requests arrive in quick succession. ([source](https://docs.stripe.com/rate-limits))
- RFC 6585 defines the 429 Too Many Requests status code for cases where a user has sent too many requests in a given amount of time. ([source](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6585))

## Further Reading

- [GitHub REST API pagination](https://docs.github.com/rest/using-the-rest-api/using-pagination-in-the-rest-api)
- [Stripe rate limits](https://docs.stripe.com/rate-limits)
- [RFC 6585](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6585)