Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the terms you will meet when working with residential and datacenter proxies — from rotation and sticky sessions to SOCKS5 and IP reputation.
Last updated:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 — including most major platforms. They excel at high-volume tasks where cost per IP dominates.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An unmetered 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.
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.
