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Scan limits, and why they exist
How often a store can be scanned is capped, and the cap is counted against the store being visited rather than against the account requesting it. That is deliberate: the limit exists to protect a merchant from us, so a cap that could be reset by asking from a different account would not be a limit at all.
How often a given storefront can be scanned is capped. The important part is what the cap is counted against: the store being visited, not the account doing the asking.
Why it is counted that way
The limit exists to protect a merchant from us. A cap that reset when you asked from a different account, or that a paying customer could raise on somebody else’s storefront, would not be protecting anyone.
It follows that your own scans of your own store share a budget with anyone else scanning it, including strangers running the free scan. That is an uncomfortable property and it is the correct one.
What happens at the ceiling
A scan you start at the limit is refused rather than queued, and you can start it again after midnight UTC, when the count starts over. Your plan’s scheduled monitoring is held back for your store ahead of everyone else’s requests, so a stranger’s free scan cannot take the run you pay for. What happens at the limit covers each case.
The current numbers
They are on the limits page, which reads them from the same constants the scanner enforces. They are deliberately not repeated here, because a limit written in prose and a limit written in code drift apart and the prose is always the one that is wrong.
How often is worth scanning anyway
Less often than you would think on a calendar, and more often than you would think on change. Theme updates, app installs and CDN setting changes are what break this. See how often should you test your store with AI agents.
Questions
Where do I see the current limits?
On the limits page in the documentation, at /docs/limits, which reads them from the same constants the scanner enforces. They are not restated here on purpose: a number written in two places eventually disagrees with itself.
I hit a limit on my own store. Why?
The cap counts every request against that storefront, including anyone else running a free scan on it. Your plan’s scheduled runs are held back for you ahead of those, so it is your own on-demand scans that meet the limit first. A scan refused at the limit is not queued: start it again after midnight UTC.