Residential Proxy
A residential proxy routes your traffic through a real device with an IP assigned by an Internet Service Provider, so requests appear to come from a genuine home user rather than a server.
Definition
A residential proxy uses IP addresses that ISPs assign to real homeowners. Because traffic appears to originate from a genuine residential device on a consumer connection, these proxies are far less likely to be flagged or blocked than datacenter IPs — making them the gold standard for tasks that demand high trust and accurate geolocation.
How residential proxies work
Providers operate large pools of residential IPs, often sourced through opt-in SDKs or peer networks. Your request is relayed through one of these real devices, so the target website sees a normal household IP and location. Pools are usually rotating (a fresh IP per request) or sticky (the same IP held for a session).
Residential vs datacenter
Residential proxies trade speed and cost for legitimacy: they are slower and pricier than datacenter proxies, but dramatically harder to detect. For sites with aggressive anti-bot defenses, that trade-off is usually worth it.
Examples
Scraping a price-comparison site at scale without getting blocked
Verifying that localized ads render correctly in a specific city
Checking search rankings from a target country
Common Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
Keep Learning
All termsGeo-Targeting
Geo-targeting is selecting proxy IPs from a specific country, region or city so your requests appear to originate from that exact location.
Read definitionDatacenter Proxy
A datacenter proxy is an IP address hosted on servers in a data center rather than assigned by an ISP — offering high speed and low cost, but easier for websites to detect.
Read definitionISP Proxy
An ISP proxy (static residential) is a datacenter-hosted IP that is registered to an Internet Service Provider, combining datacenter speed with residential-level trust.
Read definitionRotating Proxy
A rotating proxy automatically assigns a different IP address from a pool for each request or on a set interval, spreading traffic across many IPs to avoid blocks.
Read definitionMobile Proxy
A mobile proxy routes traffic through real 3G/4G/5G cellular connections, using carrier-assigned IPs that are the hardest of all proxy types to detect or block.
Read definition