Home › Glossary › What Is Residential Proxy?

What Is Residential Proxy?

A residential proxy routes internet traffic through an IP address assigned by an internet service provider to a real home connection, making requests appear to come from an ordinary consumer device.

Why they’re used in scraping

Because residential IPs look like normal user traffic rather than datacenter traffic, they are less likely to be flagged or blocked by anti-bot systems, particularly on sites with strict scraping defenses like major e-commerce and travel platforms.

Tradeoffs

Residential proxies are typically slower and more expensive than datacenter proxies, so they’re usually reserved for higher-difficulty targets rather than used across every request.