SauceNAO not working or down? Daily limit, no results and low similarity fixed

Which message are you seeing?

SauceNAO's limits, in numbers

We copied these from SauceNAO's own limit messages, not from forum posts. The latest copies we could find (April to August 2025) say an unregistered visitor gets 20 searches a day. An older copy (January 2023) says 3 searches every 30 seconds. In 2022 the daily number was 50, so it does change.

• No account: 20 a day, 3 per 30 seconds, counted per IP address.
• Free account: higher limits. SauceNAO shows the exact numbers on your account page after login; its sign-up page sat behind a security check when we tried, so we could not read them.
• Paid upgrade: listed on SauceNAO's Patreon as Account Upgrade, 6 US dollars a month, for people who search all day.

"Daily Search Limit Exceeded"

The full message reads: "your IP has exceeded the unregistered user's daily limit of 20 searches. Please register or log in to increase this limit." It counts by IP address, not by person. On school or office wifi, or on a mobile network that shares one address between many phones, other people's searches can use up your allowance before you start.

Fix: register a free account and log in; the message itself says this raises the limit. The message does not say when the count resets, so do not sit and refresh. Our guide on how SauceNAO works explains accounts and limits in more detail.

Try instead today: Google Lens and Yandex do not show you a daily search count, and IQDB covers anime-style art. Our SauceNAO alternatives test shows which one fits your picture.

"Search Rate Too High"

This is the short limit: "rate limit of 3 searches every 30 seconds" for visitors without an account. It usually hits when you try several crops of the same page in a row. We saw this exact message ourselves on 27 October 2026, on our fifth search in under a minute.

Fix: wait 30 seconds, then search once. Make your best crop first instead of testing five rough ones. A free account raises this limit too.

"Low similarity results have been hidden"

SauceNAO found nothing close, so it folded the weak matches away behind "Click here to display them...". Those hidden results are almost always unrelated. They are not filtered for safety either: low matches can include explicit images, so think twice before you open them.

How low is too low? In our test of its sister engine IQDB, every right answer scored between 76% and 96%, and every wrong one between 46% and 49%. Treat anything in the 40s as a miss.

Fix: crop to one panel; cut out speech bubbles, watermarks and the phone's status bar; use the biggest version of the picture you have. Then search again.

Try instead today: for covers and colour manhwa, Google Lens named all six covers in our test where image-board engines struggled. See Google Lens vs SauceNAO.

Results, but none of them are right

No error, just a list of wrong titles. This is the most common failure, and it is about the picture, not the site. SauceNAO's manga coverage comes from chapter pages, so it matches an untouched black-and-white page well. It struggles with:

• Covers and promotional art (Google Lens is better here).
• Colour webtoon panels from an app, with the app bar still in the frame.
• TikTok and Instagram frames with filters, zoom, text or mirroring.
• Photos of a screen or a printed page, shot at an angle.
• Very new chapters that are not indexed yet.

Fix: straighten and crop the picture, then check the step-by-step method for finding a manga from a picture.

"Just a moment..." and "Performing security verification"

That is Cloudflare, the security service in front of SauceNAO, checking that you are a person. We saw it on every scripted request we made, and a Play Store review of a SauceNAO app says the app stopped working for the same reason.

Fix: open saucenao.com in a normal browser tab, not the in-app browser of TikTok, Instagram or Discord. Allow JavaScript and cookies for the site, pause your VPN, and give the check a few seconds. If it loops, try a different browser.

"You need an Image!"

SauceNAO could not read what you sent. The message lists what it accepts: "gif, jpg, png, bmp, or webp". Its upload page also caps files at 15 MB.

• iPhone photo in HEIC format: take a screenshot of it instead; screenshots save as PNG.
• Image link: some sites refuse to hand their images to other sites. Save the picture and upload the file.
• Huge scan: crop it to one panel. That fixes the size and usually the match.

Results load but the thumbnails are blank

SauceNAO has posted before that "the server which holds most of the result thumbnails has failed", while searches still worked. If the titles and similarity numbers show, the search worked; the pictures are the only thing missing.

What to search with while SauceNAO is out

1. Google Lens for covers, colour manhwa and screenshots. Built into the Google app and Chrome.
2. Yandex Images as a second opinion. Read the text tags above the results.
3. IQDB for anime-style art and official illustrations.
4. Find by description if you remember the story but have no usable picture.

One thing MangaTrace cannot do: get you past SauceNAO's limits. We hand your picture to SauceNAO exactly as you would, so its limits and security check still apply. When it says no, the other buttons are the way round.