Requesting Response Field Indicating If API Returns a "can not do that" text

I don’t know if I understand your set-up in full but technically you could work out a solution whereby you have the API return a JSON object that includes both the actual API response and a standardized classifier that is indicative of the nature of response (could be binary value or some such). You can then just parse the JSON and based on the value of the classifier you proceed in the desired way.