Cloudflare error 1015 — "You are being rate limited" — is the block page Cloudflare serves when your IP exceeds the request-rate rules the site owner configured at Cloudflare's edge. It's rate limiting enforced by the CDN in front of the site, one step short of harder responses like error 1020 or a challenge page.
Site owners define rate-limiting rules in Cloudflare — for example, no more than N requests per minute per IP to a given path. Exceed the threshold and Cloudflare's edge answers with the 1015 block page instead of forwarding your request to the origin server at all. It's IP-based and usually temporary, on the scale of seconds to minutes, though the site owner chooses the ban window.
It's worth distinguishing from an HTTP 429: a 429 typically comes from the origin application's own rate limiter, while 1015 is Cloudflare's edge acting on the site's configured rules. For a scraper the diagnosis differs — 1015 means the CDN counted your per-IP volume, so retrying harder from the same IP only extends the block.
The signal being scored is request velocity per IP, so the fixes are pacing and distribution: slow the per-IP request rate below the site's threshold, spread volume across a rotating pool (residential IPs where Cloudflare's configuration is strict), and back off genuinely when a block appears rather than hammering retries into a longer ban.
Because 1015 rules are per-path and per-site, there's no universal safe rate — production scrapers treat the first 1015 as calibration, recording the volume that triggered it and pacing that target accordingly from then on.
How Crawlora handles this
Crawlora absorbs edge rate limits as part of the request lifecycle — pacing, pool distribution, and backoff happen inside the API, and a request that gets blocked at Cloudflare's edge isn't billed, so 1015s cost you nothing while the routing adapts.
Glossary
FAQ
The site owner sets the ban window in their rate-limiting rule — commonly seconds to a few minutes. Continuing to send requests during the window can extend it, so the correct response is to stop entirely and resume slower.
Both mean 'too many requests', but 1015 is enforced by Cloudflare's edge using the site's configured rules, while a 429 usually comes from the origin application itself. A 429 often includes a Retry-After header; 1015 gives you a block page and an IP-scoped timeout.
Temporarily — the block is per-IP, so a fresh IP starts clean. But the same request rate from the new IP trips the same rule, and popular VPN exit IPs are often already rate-limited by other users' traffic. Sustainable scraping fixes the rate, not just the IP.
Browse Crawlora APIs, test a request in Playground, and move from scraping infrastructure work to production data workflows.