What is a Residential Proxy?

A residential proxy routes your web requests through an IP address that’s been reserved for home users. When engaging in browser automation, this ensures that target servers cannot easily detect that a machine agent is making the requests. While the law protects the right of such automations to crawl the web, many websites will put up anti-bot measures in an effort to use the data they collect or generate as a competitive advantage. Residential proxies help circumvent these controls.

Going deeper, different IP address ranges are reserved for different use-cases. While residential IPs are reserved for home users, your servers will instead be assigned commercial IPs, broadcasting that there is not, in fact, a human making the requests. While most servers will allow a few requests to be made from a commercial IP, at any meaningful scale, it’s essential you address your IP addresses strategically.

For business operations such as web scraping, market research, or social media automation, residential proxies are a must. generative AIIn truth, the future of the web is in autonomous machine agents, and in the years to come, such services are only growing in relevance.

How can BrowserCat help with residential proxies?

Implementing residential proxies can get tricky, especially where scalability and efficient management are required. BrowserCat makes it easy, in just a line or two of code, to route our browser traffic through your residential proxy of choice. This also frees you to purchases IPs from multiple providers, ensuring you won’t ever be blocked.

Additionally, BrowserCat offers unlimited scale, affordable costs, and ease of access that’s unparalleled in the field. Whether your focus is data extraction, image generation, testing, or browser automation, we make working with scriptable browsers a breeze.