The countdown
Proxies have a reputation problem: people picture sneaker bots and shady account farms. But some of the most interesting work on the web depends on seeing it from somewhere else. Here are ten uses that rarely make the brochures.
10. Checking what your own customers see
Companies are often surprised by their own websites. A cookie banner that breaks checkout in France, a price shown in the wrong currency in Canada, a redirect loop in Australia. A few proxies let a product manager see every market's version before customers complain. See localization testing.
9. Accessibility and performance checks from far away
A site that loads in one second in London can take eight in Jakarta. Testing through proxies in distant regions shows real-world load times, and helps teams catch accessibility problems such as CAPTCHAs that only appear for certain regions.
8. Catching fake reviews
Review platforms, brands and regulators hunt networks of fake reviews. Collecting reviews across many products and countries, and spotting the patterns, takes the same polite, distributed data collection proxies enable. See review monitoring.
7. Political ad transparency
Journalists and researchers check which political and issue ads are shown in which regions. Public ad libraries help, but seeing ads as a local user does is often the only way to confirm what voters actually saw.
Proxy tip: A practical next step is to run a few requests through a commercial pool and watch what changes. Geonode supports HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 and lets you switch between rotating and sticky sessions from the same endpoint. We walk through it in our Geonode proxies guide.
6. Measuring internet censorship
Projects such as OONI and university labs measure which websites are blocked in which countries. Vantage points inside, or appearing to be inside, each network are how censorship gets documented rather than guessed at.
5. Saving the web for history
Web archives crawl billions of pages so they survive deletion. Some pages look different, or only exist, in certain countries. Distributed crawling helps archives capture the web as people around the world really saw it.
4. Academic research on online prices
Researchers study whether online shops show different prices to different people and places. Running identical searches from controlled locations is the only fair experiment, and proxies make the locations controllable. See academic research proxies.
3. Threat intelligence and security research
Security teams visit phishing kits and malicious sites without revealing their company's own IP addresses, which attackers watch for. Proxies keep investigators anonymous while they collect evidence. See cybersecurity research.
Budget tip: For jobs where a fixed IP list is enough, Webshare is one of the cheapest options: shared datacenter proxies are sold by the IP, and static residential (ISP) proxies cost well under a dollar per IP per month at the time of writing. More in Webshare's free proxy plan.
2. Travel fares and hotel rates
Flights and hotels can be priced by the country you book from, the "point of sale". Fare aggregators and curious travellers compare those prices from several countries at once. See travel fare proxies.
1. Keeping AI honest about the present
AI assistants and agents that browse the web on your behalf need to see current, local, unblocked pages, not a cached guess. Proxy networks are quietly becoming part of the plumbing that lets AI agents read the real-time web. See AI agents and proxies.
Residential tip: If you want to try this on an ethically sourced residential pool, Rayobyte offers a free trial with no credit card, then pay-as-you-go traffic from $3.50 per GB that drops to $0.70 per GB at 1 TB. See choosing the right Rayobyte product.
Learn more
- Top 10 ways proxies are used
- Top 10 surprising facts about IP addresses
- Brand protection proxies
- Ethical web scraping
- OONI, the Open Observatory of Network Interference
- The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto
- Google's Ads Transparency Center
- The Internet Archive
Sources and further reading
Independent references that back up the points above, from standards bodies, governments, universities and non-profits. They open in a new tab.
- Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI): A non-profit that measures internet censorship around the world.
- The Citizen Lab (University of Toronto): The University of Toronto lab that investigates digital surveillance and censorship.
- Ads Transparency Center (Google): Google's public library of the ads advertisers run in each region.
- Internet Archive (Internet Archive): The non-profit library of the web, a large-scale crawler itself.
- RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics (IETF / RFC Editor): The HTTP standard that defines how proxies, tunnels and the CONNECT method behave.
Editorial note: Proxy providers change their pools, features and prices often, so treat any figures here as typical ranges at the time of writing and confirm current terms with the provider before you buy.