Inconsistent 403/401

I’m trying to setup a query to list company directors for our partners.

I’m currently testing and querying once every 5 to 10 minutes. The same line of code occasionally works, but I routinely get 401 or 403 errors. I have registered my public API address, waited days between queries to make sure I’m not rate limited. My main concern is that it appears inconsistent: I’m not more likely to have success after not querying for a day; I occasionally had queries fail, and the same query work within minutes of trying. I’ve made sure to use the simplest possible code to not miss anything wonky:

import requests
api_key = ‘xxx’ #
find_url = “https://api.companieshouse.gov.uk/search/companies?q={}
query = “PARTNER NAME”
response = requests.get(url, auth=(api_key, ‘’))
if response.status_code == 200: