Have you ever seen an hourly rate limit error message in your widgets that use Google Analytics 4? The rate limit is added by GA4 and may appear in your widgets when it's been reached.

This is what the error message looks like:

Quotas are an industry standard, and with the higher usage of Google Analytics 4 due to the users migrating from Google Analytics. GA4's team had started to apply API request limit quotas to balance the usage and make it more predictable.

Google Analytics 4 tracks the requests in so-called "tokens". This means that heavy requests with wide date ranges, many dimensions, and metrics can use up the quota quickly because they use up a lot of "tokens". You can find more detailed information about this here.

Tip: To avoid reaching the hourly rate limit, we recommend not including today's data in your date range.