HTTP 200 OK

What HTTP 200 means

HTTP 200 OK is the default success status. For a GET request it means the response body contains the requested resource; for a POST it means the action completed and the body describes the result. It is by far the most common status on the web — every normal page view, API read and asset download ends in a 200.

A 200 always carries a response body (unlike 204) and does not imply a new resource was created (that is 201). Returning 200 for error pages — a so-called soft error — is a common API and SEO anti-pattern: clients and search engines treat the response as valid content.

Common causes of 200 responses

• A page, API resource or file was served successfully.
• A form submission or API call completed and returned data.
• A cached copy was revalidated and served by a CDN edge (check the age and cache headers).
• An error page misconfigured to answer with 200 instead of 404 or 500 (soft error).

Good practices for developers

• Return 200 only when the request truly succeeded; use 201 for creation, 204 for empty success and 4xx/5xx for failures.
• Never serve “not found” content with a 200 status — search engines index it and monitoring tools miss the failure.
• Include correct Content-Type and caching headers so proxies and browsers handle the body properly.

Example response

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json
Cache-Control: max-age=300

{"status":"ok","items":[...]}

SEO impact

For SEO a 200 is the signal that a URL is alive and indexable. Make sure only real, canonical content answers with 200 — duplicate or empty pages returning 200 waste crawl budget and can be flagged as soft 404s in Google Search Console.

FAQ