A residential proxy routes traffic through an IP address assigned to a real home ISP subscriber, making requests look like organic consumer traffic rather than server traffic.
Residential proxies are used where a target site blocks or rate-limits datacenter IPs — price monitoring, ad verification, sneaker bots, travel fare scraping, and SEO rank tracking. They cost 10-50x more than datacenter proxies because the IP inventory is sourced from SDKs, VPNs, and affiliate networks paid per GB of shared bandwidth.
Key quality signals: IP pool size, geo targeting granularity, sticky session support, and ASN diversity.