Reports

I was having trouble with a YouTube Data API request and kept receiving this error in the response:

{
  "error": {
    "code": 403,
    "message": "Requests from referer <empty> are blocked.",
    "errors": [
      {
        "message": "Requests from referer <empty> are blocked.",
        "domain": "global",
        "reason": "forbidden"
      }
    ]
  }
}

After logging the raw API response and debugging further, I realized the issue was related to the missing Referer header in my cURL request.

Since I was using an API key restricted by domain in the Google Cloud Console, I needed to explicitly set the Referer header to match one of the allowed domains.

Here’s how I fixed it:

$ch = curl_init();
$options = [
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30,
    CURLOPT_USERAGENT => 'YouTube Module/1.0',
    CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => true,
    CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,
    CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 3,
    CURLOPT_REFERER => 'http://my-allowed-domain-in-google.com', // Must match one of your allowed domains
    CURLOPT_HEADER => true, // Include headers for debugging
];

curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

$response = curl_exec($ch);
$httpCode = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

curl_close($ch);

With this change, I started receiving a 200 OK response, and the API began returning the expected data — including the items array.

If you're facing a similar issue and using a domain-restricted API key, make sure to include the correct Referer header in your request.

Thanks to everyone who helped me along the way — happy coding! 😊

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