What is ad cloaking?
Ad cloaking is serving one version of an ad or landing page to reviewers, verification tools and datacenter IPs, and a different one to ordinary visitors. The compliant version passes the ad network's review; the cloaked version carries the real payload, such as a forbidden offer, a forced redirect or a download. Google's "Cloak of Visibility" research measured the technique across search and ad traffic.
How to check: load the same ad and landing page from a datacenter exit and from a residential exit in the target city, record both redirect chains and final URLs, and repeat from a second residential exit before calling a difference cloaking.
What is ad verification?
Ad verification is the practice of checking that digital advertisements actually appear as purchased — correct placement, geography, creative, and landing page — and that they are not served alongside fraud or brand-unsafe content. Verifiers use residential proxies in each target market because ad servers deliver different campaigns to different locations and often hide problems from datacenter traffic.
What is anti-bot detection?
Anti-bot detection is the set of techniques websites use to distinguish automated traffic from human visitors: IP reputation checks, TLS and browser fingerprinting, JavaScript challenges, behavioral analysis, and CAPTCHAs. Residential proxies address the IP layer of detection, but robust automation also needs realistic browser fingerprints and request patterns to pass the remaining layers.
What is ASN targeting?
ASN targeting selects proxy IPs belonging to a specific Autonomous System Number — the registry identifier for a network operator such as an ISP or carrier. Targeting by ASN lets you route traffic through a particular provider's network, which is useful when a website treats traffic from different ISPs differently or when you need to replicate the exact network conditions of a customer segment.
What is bandwidth-based (per-GB) pricing?
Bandwidth-based pricing charges for the volume of data transferred through the proxy, typically per gigabyte, regardless of how many IPs or requests you use. Per-GB plans suit lightweight, infrequent workloads. For data-heavy workloads — media files, full-page rendering, or continuous scraping — costs scale linearly with traffic, which is when unlimited-bandwidth plans become more economical.
What is a datacenter proxy?
A datacenter proxy routes traffic through an IP address owned by a cloud or hosting provider rather than a consumer ISP. Datacenter proxies are faster and cheaper than residential proxies because they run on server infrastructure, but their IP ranges are publicly identifiable as non-residential, so sophisticated websites block them more readily. They suit high-volume tasks against targets with weak bot detection.
What is geo-targeting?
Geo-targeting is selecting proxy IPs from a specific country, city, or region so that websites serve the content local users see. Search results, prices, ad placements, and product availability all vary by visitor location, so accurate geo-targeting is essential for SEO monitoring, ad verification, and market research. Granularity ranges from country level down to city, ZIP code, or specific ISP.
What is the difference between GIVT and SIVT?
GIVT (general invalid traffic) is ad traffic that can be identified with routine filters: known crawlers and bots, traffic from known data-center IP ranges, and activity that declares itself non-human. SIVT (sophisticated invalid traffic) needs advanced analysis to detect: hijacked devices, malware-driven browsing, cookie stuffing and other traffic designed to look like a person. The Media Rating Council's invalid-traffic guidelines define both classes.
Why it matters for verification: because data-center traffic is filtered as GIVT, a check from a datacenter IP can be dropped or served a different page. Residential IPv4 exits are not classified as data-center traffic, though invalid-traffic tools also score IP reputation and behavior, and heavily reused proxy exits can be flagged as SIVT.
What is an HTTP/HTTPS proxy?
An HTTP proxy forwards web traffic and understands the HTTP protocol, which lets it add headers, cache responses, or filter requests. For encrypted traffic, the client sends an HTTP CONNECT request and the proxy opens a blind tunnel to the destination, so HTTPS content stays end-to-end encrypted. HTTP proxies are the simplest option for browsers and scraping libraries, which support them natively.
What is IP reputation?
IP reputation is a score that websites, anti-fraud systems, and blocklists assign to an IP address based on its observed history — spam, abuse, bot activity, or association with datacenter ranges. Low-reputation IPs face CAPTCHAs, throttling, or outright blocks regardless of how legitimate the current request is. Proxy quality largely comes down to how clean the pool's reputation is and how it is maintained.
What is IP rotation?
IP rotation is the practice of changing or requesting a change to the outbound address used for traffic. Providers may rotate per request, per connection, on a timer, or through an explicit selector. Rotation can distribute requests across available exits, but addresses can repeat and it does not reset cookies, guarantee anonymity, prevent rate limits, or ensure target acceptance.
What is an IPv4 proxy?
An IPv4 proxy uses an address from the original 32-bit Internet Protocol space, which offers roughly 4.3 billion addresses. Because IPv4 space is exhausted and universally supported, IPv4 proxies work with every website but cost more than IPv6. Virtually all consumer ISPs still assign IPv4 addresses, which is why residential IPv4 proxies remain the most compatible and most in-demand proxy type.
What is an IPv6 proxy?
An IPv6 proxy uses an address from the 128-bit Internet Protocol version 6 space, which is effectively unlimited. IPv6 proxies are significantly cheaper per IP and available in huge volumes, but not every website is reachable over IPv6, so they suit targets that support it. They excel at high-volume tasks where cost per IP dominates.
What is malvertising?
Malvertising is the use of legitimate advertising channels to deliver malware or fraud: an ad creative or its landing page carries a forced redirect, a fake update prompt, a scam offer or an exploit. Because the payload is often shown only to consumer IPs in specific countries, it can pass the ad network's review and a verification vendor's scan from datacenter or office networks.
How to check: open the creative's landing page through a residential exit in each targeted market with a clean browser profile, capture the redirect chain, final URL and screenshot, and never click the ad during a check.
What is a proxy pool?
A proxy pool is the set of IP addresses a provider can route traffic through. A larger advertised pool can offer more potential exit diversity, but it does not guarantee a unique or accepted address for a target. Evaluate usable geography, sourcing, repeated exits, reputation, and target results alongside the headline size.
What is a residential proxy?
A residential proxy routes your internet traffic through an IP address assigned by a consumer internet service provider (ISP) to a real household device. Because websites see a genuine home connection rather than a server, residential proxies are far less likely to be blocked or challenged by anti-bot systems than datacenter IPs. They are the standard choice for web scraping, ad verification, and any workflow that must look like ordinary user traffic.
What is a rotating proxy?
A rotating proxy changes or requests a change to the outbound exit under a provider's request, connection, timed, or explicit rotation model. Rotation can increase exit diversity, but an address can repeat and target acceptance is not guaranteed. TrueProxies Residential IPv4 exposes normal and explicit rotation through documented username forms rather than a timed selector.
What is SERP monitoring?
SERP monitoring is the automated tracking of search engine results pages for chosen keywords across locations and devices. Search results are heavily localized, so accurate rank tracking requires querying from IPs inside each target market. Tools use rotating residential proxies to collect results at scale without triggering the CAPTCHAs that search engines show to suspicious traffic.
What is a SOCKS5 proxy?
SOCKS5 is a transport-level proxy protocol that forwards arbitrary TCP (and optionally UDP) traffic without interpreting it, unlike HTTP proxies which understand web requests specifically. Because SOCKS5 is protocol-agnostic, it works for any application — browsers, scrapers, games, or custom software. It supports authentication and is generally preferred when tunneling non-HTTP traffic through a proxy.
How is a static proxy different from a sticky session?
A static proxy is designed as a longer-lived IP allocation whose lifetime and replacement rules still depend on the provider and product; it is not inherently permanent. A sticky session instead asks a rotating pool to reuse one assigned exit while it remains available. Reusing the same session identifier can support a permitted login, cart, or multi-step flow, but it does not promise a permanent address or fixed duration and does not maintain application state by itself.
What is UDP over SOCKS5?
UDP over SOCKS5 is the SOCKS5 feature that relays UDP packets through the proxy (the protocol calls it UDP ASSOCIATE). The client opens a normal SOCKS5 connection, asks for a UDP relay, and then sends packets to a relay port the proxy returns; replies come back the same way. It is what lets QUIC, HTTP/3 and DNS use a proxy, since HTTP proxies carry TCP only. On TrueProxies it is included on paid Unlimited Bandwidth plans and traffic packs for destination ports 443 and 53, with the same host, port and login as TCP.
What is an unlimited bandwidth proxy?
An unlimited proxy plan charges a fixed price for unlimited data transfer at a defined speed tier, instead of billing per gigabyte. Costs stay predictable no matter how much traffic the workload generates, which suits continuous scraping, streaming verification, and other high-volume tasks. The trade-off is a bandwidth cap expressed as connection speed rather than data volume.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping is the automated extraction of publicly available data from websites, used for price monitoring, market research, SEO tracking, and machine-learning datasets. Because websites rate-limit and block repeated automated access from a single address, scraping at scale depends on proxies to distribute requests across many IPs and on parsers that tolerate page-structure changes.