Residential proxy

Definition

A residential proxy routes your request through a real home internet connection — an IP address assigned by an ISP (Comcast, BT, Deutsche Telekom, etc.) to a consumer subscriber. The residential IP is announced under the ISP's ASN (Autonomous System Number), which is indistinguishable at the network layer from a normal household's traffic.

Contrast with datacenter proxies, which announce from cloud provider ASNs (AWS, GCP, Azure) and are trivially identifiable as automated traffic.

When residential is the right class for AI

Four specific cases where residential beats other classes:

1. The source geoblocks cloud ASNs. Regional news, some government sites, some enterprise SaaS return empty or degraded content to AWS/GCP traffic. Residential resolves it.

2. Regional LLM evaluation. Model APIs apply different policy per origin region; datacenter IPs are classified instantly as non-consumer, which confounds the eval.

3. Training corpus diversity. Models trained on datacenter-visible web content over-sample enterprise long- form and under-sample regional / community content. Residential sampling corrects this.

4. Competitive AI intelligence. Scraping public model outputs from residential IPs avoids the tighter rate-limits platforms apply to cloud-origin bulk traffic.

Provenance

For research publications, the sourcing posture of the residential pool matters — specifically, how peers were onboarded and whether they meaningfully consented to share their bandwidth. Our ethical provenance post covers the framing in depth.

SquadProxy's residential pool is built on an opt-in SDK integration with disclosed value exchange. No stealth installations, no bundleware.

Related

• Residential proxy class (product page)
• Datacenter proxy glossary entry
• ISP proxy glossary entry
• Residential vs datacenter for AI