framework-http-rate-control-headers.md
Comprehensive reference for the HTTP response headers that communicate rate limit state and backoff guidance to clients: the standardized Retry-After (RFC 9110) and the rate limit family covering both the widely deployed de facto convention X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, X-RateLimit-Reset and the IETF standardization track RateLimit-Limit, RateLimit-Remaining, RateLimit-Reset, RateLimit-Policy. Includes the status code companions 429 Too Many Requests and 503 Service Unavailable that activate Retry-After, plus the full nginx limit_req and limit_conn configuration that produces them. Built for Bubbles (Debian, Nginx 1.26+, self hosted origin at 169.155.162.118, no Cloudflare or third party CDN in front). Companion to framework-http-caching-headers.md, framework-http-content-headers.md, framework-http-seo-headers.md, framework-http-security-headers.md, framework-http-performance-headers.md, framework-http-cors-headers.md, UNIVERSAL-RANKING-FRAMEWORK.md, and SEO BUILD REFERENCE v2.4.
Audience: humans configuring nginx rate limiting, AI assistants generating or repairing rate limit config, API engineers shaping client backoff behavior, SEO operators ensuring Googlebot and AI crawlers are not accidentally throttled, and anyone troubleshooting "429s on legitimate users", "Googlebot dropped my pages", "client retry storm after maintenance", or "rate limit headers missing on API responses" anomalies on a self hosted stack.
