Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
Do CAPTCHAs Stop Bots or Just Slow Them Down? Measuring Deterrence Against Solve Rate
What two decades of research says about CAPTCHAs: how long they cost humans, how often bots and AI agents solve them, and why they now work as a cost.
Elena Petrova · October 11, 2026 Public-Interest Price Monitoring: Collecting Evidence That Stands Up to Scrutiny
How consumer groups, journalists and compliance teams monitor prices to test discount claims, and how to collect evidence a retailer cannot dismiss.
Priya Nair · October 11, 2026 What Your Legal Team Will Ask Before Approving a Scraping Project
The questions legal and compliance teams ask before they sign off on web data collection, why they ask them, and what a good answer looks like.
Sofia Marin · October 10, 2026 Auditing NAP Consistency Across Local Directories
A business listed with an old phone number or address on a dozen directories confuses customers and search engines. How to audit NAP data and fix what matters.
Daniel Okafor · October 10, 2026 When You Don't Need a Residential Proxy
We fetched 30 public sites from a datacenter IP and through residential exits. Over half needed no proxy at all. How to tell which kind of site you have.
James Meadow · October 9, 2026 Testing Scrapers: Fixtures, Replay and Regression Suites
Scrapers break when sites change, and tests that hit the live site break with them. How to test a scraper with recorded fixtures, replay and daily canaries.
Chris Collins · October 9, 2026 Your Scraper Is Slow and It Probably Isn't the Proxy
We sped up a scraper running through residential proxies 7.5 times without touching the proxy. How to find where the time really goes, and fix it.
Matt Brown · October 8, 2026 Payload Efficiency: What Share of a Scraped Page Is Boilerplate You Paid For
We measured 278 content pages from the top 1,000 sites. The text you want is about 1% of the HTML and a tiny share of what a browser downloads.
Elena Petrova · October 8, 2026