Matt Brown
Customer Success
Matt writes the practical side: setting up proxies, fixing errors and getting the most out of a plan, drawn from the questions customers ask most often.
Writes about
- Setup guides
- Troubleshooting and errors
- Plans and account management
Articles by Matt Brown
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October 8, 2026 · Scraping
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.
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October 5, 2026 · Knowledge
Decoding SERP API Pricing: What Drives Cost and How to Pay Less
A SERP API bill is keywords times depth times locations times devices times frequency. Why depth got ten times dearer in 2025, and how to pay less.
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October 4, 2026 · Knowledge
Writing a Company Data Collection Policy: A Working Template
Most teams that collect web data have no written rules for it. A working policy template: scope, approvals, sources, personal data and takedowns.
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October 3, 2026 · Knowledge
Rate Parity Monitoring: Catching Your Own Inventory Undercut
Hotels lose direct bookings when their own rooms appear cheaper elsewhere. How to monitor rate parity across channels and markets without false alarms.
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October 2, 2026 · Knowledge
How to Detect Fake Reviews and Review Fraud at Scale
Fake reviews are banned in the US, UK and EU, and platforms remove hundreds of millions. How to detect review fraud across many products, with tested code.
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October 1, 2026 · Scraping
Keep the Raw Response: Archiving Scraped Pages in WARC for Replay
Parsers improve and extractors break, but a page you did not keep cannot be parsed again. How to store raw responses in WARC, with tested code and real sizes.
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September 29, 2026 · Knowledge
Schema Drift in Scraped Data: Catching Broken Extractors Before Your Users Do
Scrapers rarely crash when a site changes. They keep running and return subtly wrong data. How data contracts and batch profiling catch drift early.
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September 28, 2026 · Knowledge
Deduplicating Scraped Data: Entity Resolution for Products, Companies and Listings
The same product, company or listing shows up many times across sources and runs. How to normalise identifiers, match safely at scale and keep one clean record.
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September 26, 2026 · Scraping
Stop Parsing HTML: Extracting Structured Data From JSON-LD and Embedded Data
Most pages already carry machine-readable data. How to extract JSON-LD and embedded JSON instead of brittle selectors, and what to do when it is incomplete.
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September 25, 2026 · Knowledge
Verifying ESG Claims With Public Web Evidence
New EU rules on green claims apply from 27 September 2026. A practical method for checking sustainability claims against public evidence, and tracking changes.
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September 24, 2026 · Knowledge
Weekday, Weekend, Holiday: How Block Rates Move With the Calendar
Nobody publishes scraper block rates by day of week. What bot, holiday and peak-event data shows about why they move, and how to measure your own calendar.
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September 22, 2026 · Scraping
Building a Target Health Score: Knowing a Site Is Turning Against You
Sites rarely block a crawler in one step. They challenge, soft-block and slow down first. How to turn those signals into one score per site, and act on it.
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September 21, 2026 · Knowledge
Do SEO Tools Report Real Search Volume? Three Vendors Against SERP Reality
Keyword Planner, Semrush and Ahrefs each estimate search volume differently. What independent tests found, and why the live SERP matters more than the number.
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September 20, 2026 · Knowledge
Ad Load by Market: How Much of a Page Is Advertising, Country by Country
Nobody has published ad bytes as a share of page bytes by country. Here is what the data does show, and why Chrome just made the real answer possible.
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September 19, 2026 · Knowledge
How to Track Layoffs and Workforce Changes in Real Time
Layoffs leave a trail of public signals before and after the headlines. How to combine WARN notices, filings, news and hiring data into a reliable event feed.
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September 18, 2026 · Scraping
How to Build Large-Scale Training Datasets from the Open Web
Collecting pages is the easy part. How to turn an open-web crawl into a training corpus: frontier, opt-outs, extraction, filtering, dedup and decontamination.
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September 16, 2026 · Knowledge
How to Detect Geo-Personalized and Dynamic Pricing Across Markets
Prices vary by place, time and person, and a single observation cannot tell which. How to design paired, controlled checks that separate the three.
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September 14, 2026 · Knowledge
How Real Estate Companies Use Web Scraping APIs for Market Intelligence
Property portals are JavaScript-heavy, paginated and localised. How real estate teams use a web scraping API as the collection layer, and what it costs.
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September 13, 2026 · Residential Proxies
White-Label Data Collection: Managing Many Clients on One Account
White-labelling makes you the data provider of record. What that means for isolation, compliance and pricing, and how to structure one account to do it.
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September 11, 2026 · Residential Proxies
Running Client SEO, Ad Verification & Competitive Intel on One Network
Agencies run three collection workloads with different needs. Why one network with one targeting model beats three vendors, and how to keep clients apart.
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September 10, 2026 · Knowledge
Competitive Campaign Intelligence: Monitoring Rival Ads Globally
Start with the official ad libraries, then observe what they cannot show you. How to build global competitor ad monitoring that survives scrutiny.
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September 9, 2026 · Knowledge
MAP Enforcement at Scale: Detecting Price Violations Automatically
Minimum advertised price is about advertising, not selling. What MAP is, how automated detection works, and why most alerts are false positives.
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September 8, 2026 · Scraping
The Digital Services Act Is Turning Web Observation Into Regulatory Infrastructure
Digital Services Act data access is reshaping platform research. See why controlled web observation and geographic vantage points matter for accountability.
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September 7, 2026 · Knowledge
How to Build Talent-Mapping and Org-Chart Data from Public Sources
A public-source org chart is a model with confidence levels, not a leaked document. Which sources carry real structural signal and where the line sits.
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September 6, 2026 · Knowledge
How to Track Brand Mentions Across Social, Forums & Review Sites
Mention tracking is a coverage problem before it is a sentiment problem. How to build query sets, dedupe syndication and see mentions outside your own region.
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September 5, 2026 · Residential Proxies
Age Verification Is Becoming a Geo-Compliance Testing Problem
Age verification laws now create location-specific product requirements. Learn how residential proxies can support authorized geo-compliance testing.
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September 4, 2026 · Knowledge
How ISP Proxies Improve Search Engine Data Collection Accuracy
Accuracy in search data is mostly about holding the vantage point still. Where static ISP IPs help, where they hurt, and how to split a collection layer.
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September 4, 2026 · Knowledge
Residential Proxies for Job-Board Data and Labour-Market Intelligence
Labour-market data is a time series, and coverage gaps look exactly like trends. How to run a stable job-board panel with residential proxies and verify it.
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September 3, 2026 · Knowledge
Why AI Agents Need Real-Time SERP APIs to Access Search Data
A model's knowledge has an edge. An agent that cannot see past it will answer confidently anyway, which is the failure mode search access is meant to prevent.
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September 2, 2026 · Knowledge
Residential Proxy Setup Checklist for Your First Project
Twelve checks, in order, from first request to a job you can leave running. Work down the list and you will avoid the mistakes that cost first-timers a month.
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September 2, 2026 · Knowledge
How to Detect Counterfeit Listings Across Global Marketplaces
Counterfeits hide behind geography, not just keywords. Here is how to search marketplaces as a local buyer would and turn findings into usable evidence.
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September 1, 2026 · Knowledge
Verifying Ad Placements at Scale: A Playbook for AdTech Teams
A verification programme is a sampling strategy, an evidence standard, and an escalation path. Here is how to design all three so findings get acted on.
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August 31, 2026 · Residential Proxies
Common Residential Proxy Errors and How to Fix Them
Every proxy failure falls into one of eight patterns, and the status code usually tells you which. Start here, identify the symptom, then go to the fix.
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August 30, 2026 · Residential Proxies
Shared vs Dedicated Residential Proxies: What's the Difference?
Dedicated means the address is yours alone, which changes who owns its reputation. Here is when that is worth paying for and when a shared pool is better.
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August 30, 2026 · Knowledge
What Is a Peer-to-Peer Residential Proxy Network?
Instead of servers in a datacenter, the network is made of ordinary people's devices. Here is how that works, what you get from it, and what you give up.
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August 29, 2026 · Knowledge
How to Plan Request Volume and Concurrency on Residential Proxies
Work backwards from the records you need to the requests, concurrency and bandwidth they imply. The arithmetic is simple and it stops most capacity surprises.
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August 28, 2026 · Residential Proxies
Residential Proxy IP Not Rotating? Causes and Fixes
Usually the proxy is rotating fine and your HTTP client is reusing one connection. Here is how to tell the difference and the six causes worth checking.
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August 28, 2026 · Knowledge
Residential Proxies for Beginners: A simple Starter Guide
What a residential proxy is, when you need one, and how to make your first request. Written for someone who has never used a proxy before.
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August 27, 2026 · Residential Proxies
Residential Proxy Sub-Users and Access Management Explained
Sub-users solve three real problems for teams. Here is what they are, what Shifter provides instead, and how to segment clients and cap usage without them.
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August 26, 2026 · Residential Proxies
Rate Limiting and Request Throttling with Residential Proxies
A large proxy pool does not exempt you from rate limits, it just changes where they apply. Here is how to pace requests per target, per IP, and across a fleet.
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August 25, 2026 · Residential Proxies
How to Whitelist Your IP for Residential Proxies
Short answer: the residential gateway does not use IP whitelisting, it uses credentials. Here is why, where whitelisting does apply, and how to set it up there.
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August 24, 2026 · Knowledge
Residential Proxy Free Trials: What to Test Before You Buy
A trial is a limited amount of bandwidth to answer one question: will this work on my targets? Here is what to test, in what order, so you do not waste it.
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August 24, 2026 · Knowledge
Residential Proxies vs Residential VPNs: What's the Difference?
Both route traffic through a home IP, but they are built for different jobs. Here is the difference in plain terms, and which one your project needs.
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August 21, 2026 · Knowledge
How Many Proxy IPs Do You Actually Need?
The most common question before buying proxies is also the wrong one. What matters is not how many IPs you have, but how your requests are spread across them.
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August 17, 2026 · Residential Proxies
Scraping Flight and Hotel Prices: Why Fares Change by Location
The same flight or room costs different amounts depending on where the shopper appears to be. To collect the real price per market, scrape from that market.
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August 13, 2026 · Knowledge
Proxy Network Alternatives: How to Actually Compare 22 Providers
A practical guide to comparing residential proxy alternatives on pool size, network spread, price per GB and real commitment. Measured figures for 22 providers.
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July 23, 2026 · Knowledge
Why Your Residential Proxy Requests Are Timing Out
A diagnostic guide to proxy timeouts: connect vs read, over-tight geo filters, timeouts tuned for datacenter, and the checks that find the real cause fast.
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July 20, 2026 · Knowledge
Residential Proxies and GDPR: A Compliance Overview
IP addresses can be personal data, and a proxy doesn't anonymise anything. The GDPR questions compliance teams should actually ask about residential proxies.
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July 15, 2026 · Knowledge
How to Estimate Your Monthly Residential Proxy Bandwidth Needs
On per-GB plans, bandwidth is what you buy. A simple formula, real per-page sizes, and worked examples to estimate your monthly residential proxy bandwidth.
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July 11, 2026 · Scraping
How to Cut Proxy Bandwidth Costs When Scraping at Scale
Residential proxies bill by the gigabyte, and a naive scraper wastes most of its bytes. Nine practical ways to cut proxy bandwidth costs without losing data.
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July 8, 2026 · Scraping
How to Scrape Local Business Data (Google Maps and Directories) with Proxies
Local listings, ratings, and rankings are served by location, so you only see them right from inside the city. How proxies fix local business data collection.
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July 3, 2026 · Knowledge
Residential Proxies for Competitor Ad Intelligence
Competitor ads are geo-targeted and personalized, so you only see them as a real local user. How residential proxies power accurate competitor ad intelligence.
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June 30, 2026 · Knowledge
Residential Proxies for B2B Lead Generation and Data Enrichment
B2B lead generation and data enrichment are data-collection problems. How residential proxies enable complete, accurate, compliant collection of public business data.
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June 27, 2026 · Residential Proxies
Five Advantages of Using Residential Proxies for Web Data Collection
Why data teams use residential proxies for web data collection: higher success rates, unbiased coverage, geo-accurate data, scale, and reliable monitoring.
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June 25, 2026 · Scraping
Common Residential Proxy Mistakes That Trigger Detection
Good residential proxies and still getting detected? Most residential proxy detection is self-inflicted. The common config mistakes, and how to fix each.
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June 19, 2026 · Knowledge
HTTP vs SOCKS5 Proxies: Which Should You Use and When
HTTP and SOCKS5 proxies solve different problems. A practical guide to how each works, where each wins, and how to pick the right one for your workload.
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June 14, 2026 · Residential Proxies
Best Residential Proxies for AI Data Scraping
Compare the best residential proxies for AI data scraping by scale, geo targeting, session control, pricing, and reliability at enterprise volume.
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June 11, 2026 · Residential Proxies
Rotating Residential Proxies for SEO Monitoring
Use rotating residential proxies for SERP scraping and SEO monitoring to reduce blocks, improve local accuracy, and scale rank tracking reliably.
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June 7, 2026 · Residential Proxies
How Residential Proxies Help AI Tools
See how residential proxies help AI tools access public web data with fewer blocks, better geo coverage, cleaner inputs, and scalable collection.
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June 5, 2026 · Residential Proxies
Residential Proxies for Price Monitoring
Residential proxies for price monitoring and market intelligence help teams collect accurate local data at scale with fewer blocks and lower cost.
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June 1, 2026 · Knowledge
Best Proxies for Price Monitoring in 2026
Find the best proxies for price monitoring with the right mix of IP quality, geo-targeting, session control, and cost efficiency at scale.
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May 24, 2026 · Knowledge
Best Proxy Provider for SEO Tools
Find the best proxy provider for SEO tools by comparing speed, geo-targeting, rotation, pricing, and reliability for large-scale rank tracking.
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May 10, 2026 · Knowledge
The Anatomy of a Residential IP
Residential, ISP, datacenter: the labels are familiar, the mechanics aren’t. A technical walkthrough of what a target site actually inspects.
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May 6, 2026 · Static Residential Proxies
ISP Proxies vs Datacenter and Residential
Pinned IPs from real ISPs are neither residential rotation nor raw datacenter. The third option that solves a specific class of problem most teams underuse.
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March 21, 2023 · News
ice Network: The Best Pi Network Alternative
Why users are leaving Pi Network for ice Network. The advantages of mining ice coins and what makes the opportunity more rewarding.
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January 24, 2023 · Knowledge
4 Simple Reasons Businesses Love To Use Proxies
Businesses love proxies for many reasons. In this article, we focus on the most important benefits for SEO, social media, online sales, and pricing.
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January 14, 2023 · Knowledge
Rotating Datacenter Proxies: How They Work and When to Use Them
Learn how rotating datacenter proxies work, where they perform best, their limitations and when ISP proxies are a better alternative.
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December 27, 2022 · Knowledge
6 Myths About Proxy Server Solutions
Are you aware of all the myths that surround proxies? Let’s debunk the most popular myths about proxy server solutions. Check out our blog post!
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December 13, 2022 · Scraping
Web Scraping Proxies: Which Type Is Best for Each Job?
Compare residential, ISP, mobile and datacenter proxies for web scraping, including costs, rotation, anti-bot handling and best-fit use cases.
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November 28, 2022 · Knowledge
5 Major Benefits For Companies That Use Proxies
Are you looking to use proxies for your business objectives? Check out and discover top 5 benefits companies enjoy when using proxy server solutions.
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September 25, 2022 · Knowledge
How to Monitor Customer Reviews with Proxies
Review data is localized, rate-limited and often gated. Here is how proxies let you collect customer reviews across markets without losing coverage.
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September 8, 2022 · Knowledge
Why Travel Fare Aggregation Needs Proxies
Do you want to benefit from proxies to improve your travel price aggregation platform? Check our article and discover how they can support your website!
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August 31, 2022 · Knowledge
How Are Proxies and SERP Data Used for SEO?
From checking on your competition to getting access to valuable data, proxies are always ready to support your efforts. How can SERP data and proxies help SEO?
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August 31, 2022 · Knowledge
Social Media Proxies: How They Work, Types and Setup
Learn how social media proxies work, which proxy types suit each platform, how many IPs you need and how to manage accounts safely.
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August 25, 2022 · Knowledge
Proxies for E-commerce: Which ones are the best? Guide
Do you have an e-commerce venture and want to grow your online business? Click and find out which proxies for e-commerce are the best ones!
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August 13, 2022 · Residential Proxies
Proxy Use Cases for Startups: Practical Setup, Costs and Growth
Explore practical proxy use cases for startups, recommended proxy types, realistic data volumes, setup requirements and first-month costs.
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June 15, 2022 · Residential Proxies
What is a Residential Proxy and Why You Should Use It?
Residential proxies bring many benefits to companies that need to access online data. Click and find out what is a residential proxy and what to use it for.
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June 14, 2022 · News
What Makes Shifter a Great Provider of Proxy Solutions?
Check out and read what makes Shifter a great provider of proxy solutions? Is it its set of high-performance residential proxies and...? Find out more!