I keep getting stale data from public APIs

That usually happens because of one of these:

• Caching by the API provider: the public API may not return the newest data immediately.
• HTTP/CDN/browser caching: your client, proxy, or CDN may be serving an old response.
• Rate limiting / replicas: you may be hitting different backend nodes with inconsistent update timing.
• Eventual consistency: the API updates behind the scenes and data lags for a short time.
• Your request is cached by default: especially with GET requests.

Things to try:

1. Check response headers Look for:

   • Cache-Control
   • Expires
   • ETag
   • Last-Modified
   • Age
   • CF-Cache-Status / X-Cache

2. Disable caching on your side Add request headers like:

   • Cache-Control: no-cache
   • Pragma: no-cache

3. Use cache-busting query params Example:

   • https://api.example.com/data?ts=1699999999

4. Use conditional requests carefully If the API supports ETag, make sure you’re not unintentionally reusing cached content.

5. Confirm with another client Test the same endpoint in:

   • curl
   • browser incognito
   • Postman
   • a different network

6. See if the API has freshness docs Some public APIs explicitly say data updates every X minutes/hours.

If you want, paste:

• the API endpoint,
• your request code,
• and the response headers,

and I can help figure out whether it’s provider caching or your client caching.