I run link building at Linkscope. Most weeks my team checks search results for a few hundred keywords across several countries. We are not doing it to watch rankings move. We do it because Google’s first page tells us who to contact, who already links to those pages, and which sites take contributed articles.
You cannot do that from one office IP. Try it and Google stops answering you within the hour. So we use proxies, and over the last few years we have paid for most of the well known ones.
This is what I would tell someone picking a provider today. Prices below are what each company listed at the time of writing. They change often, so check before you buy.
What SEO work actually needs from a proxy
Most proxy comparisons rank on pool size. For SEO work that is close to the wrong measure.
Here is what matters instead.
Clean IPs. A shared pool means other people have already sent Google traffic from the same address. If they were careless, you inherit the block. This is the single biggest difference between a scrape that runs all day and one that dies.
Location control. Google shows different results in different cities. If a client sells in Dallas, a check from a random US address is not the answer they need. Country level targeting is not enough for local work. Our guide to local SEO link building covers why that gap matters.
Session control. You want to hold one IP for a small batch of searches, then move on. Changing IP on every single request is its own pattern.
Bandwidth is cheap here. A search results page is small. A rank tracking job that feels enormous might use two or three gigabytes in a month. So a high price per gigabyte hurts far less in SEO work than it does in scraping product pages or video. Keep that in mind when you compare the numbers below, because it changes which provider is actually expensive for you.
Support that answers. When a job breaks at 2am, the difference between a real support channel and a ticket form is your whole week.
The eight providers
1. Live Proxies: best for clean IPs on Google
Live Proxies sells private IP allocation. The addresses assigned to you are yours for the plan, not shared with whoever else is online. For Google work that is the feature that counts, because most blocks come from someone else’s behaviour rather than yours.
Plans start at $70 for 200 IPs and 4GB over 30 days, which works out at $17.50 per gigabyte. Larger plans bring that down to around $10.60. Sticky sessions run to 60 minutes. They offer US state level options, though availability moves around, so check what is in stock when you buy.
That per gigabyte price is the highest on this list by a wide margin. For heavy scraping it would be hard to justify. For rank tracking and SERP checks, where you use very little bandwidth and care mostly about not getting blocked, it is the trade I would make.
Watch out for: static residential is currently listed as unavailable, so this is a rotating product.
2. Froxy: best all-rounder for SEO teams
Froxy is a client of ours, so treat this entry with that in mind. I am including it because I use their Telegram community and I have watched how they handle problems, and the answers come back fast and from people who know the product.
On the numbers they hold up well. Over 120 million IPs across 200 plus countries. Residential starts at $1.88 per gigabyte, mobile at $2.73, datacenter at $0.42. HTTP and SOCKS5 both supported. ISP level targeting is available in several countries including the US, UK, Brazil, India, Japan and Turkey, and city level targeting comes with the mobile product.
The part most SEO teams will care about is the built in SERP scraping endpoint at $1.32 per thousand requests. If you would rather not build and maintain your own Google scraper, that removes most of the work. Very few providers at this price bundle one.
Watch out for: city level targeting sits on the mobile product rather than residential, so check that against what you need.
3. Bright Data: best at enterprise scale
The largest network here by a distance, with over 400 million residential IPs across 195 countries. Targeting goes down to city, ASN and ZIP code, which is the most precise on this list.
Pay as you go runs about $4 per gigabyte at current promotional rates, with a list price of $8. Subscriptions bring it to roughly $2.50 at volume.
If you are running rank tracking for hundreds of clients across many markets, this is the default answer. For a small agency it is more platform than you need, and the account setup takes real time.
4. Oxylabs: best for large in-house teams
Around 175 million residential IPs, with a claimed 99.9% uptime and named account management. Pricing runs about $6 per gigabyte for small teams, falling toward $2.50 at enterprise volume.
Oxylabs is built for companies that want a contract, an account manager and a support agreement rather than a dashboard and a credit card. If that describes your setup, it is a strong pick. If it does not, you are paying for a service layer you will never call.
5. Decodo: best value for mid-size agencies
Decodo is the company formerly called Smartproxy. Around 115 million residential IPs, with subscriptions starting near $2 per gigabyte.
This is the one I recommend most often to agencies with five to twenty clients. The setup is simple, the dashboard makes sense, and the price sits in a sensible place. It does not lead on any single feature. It is just hard to go wrong with.
6. SOAX: best for granular location targeting
Around 155 million residential IPs, with city, ISP and ASN level targeting. Pricing starts near $3.60 per gigabyte on a starter plan with a 25GB minimum.
That minimum is the catch. If your monthly SEO usage is three gigabytes, you are buying 25. But if local search is most of your work and you need many cities checked properly, the targeting is worth the look.
7. IPRoyal: best low cost entry
Around 32 million residential IPs, starting near $1.75 per gigabyte on pay as you go, and the traffic you buy does not expire.
That last point matters more than it sounds. If you check rankings once a month, most subscriptions waste money on unused allowance. Buying traffic that sits there until you need it fits that pattern well. The pool is smaller than the leaders, so expect more retries on hard targets.
8. Infatica: best built-in SERP tooling
Around 35 million residential IPs, starting near $3.84 per gigabyte on a 25GB plan, with a SERP scraper API included that handles JavaScript and CAPTCHA solving.
Like Froxy, the appeal is that you are buying a working search scraper rather than the parts to build one. Smaller network, and the price per gigabyte is on the higher side for the pool you get.
Which one for which job
Rank tracking for a handful of clients. IPRoyal or Decodo. Low volume, low cost, no minimum you will not use.
Local SEO across many cities. SOAX or Bright Data for the targeting depth. Live Proxies if the campaigns are US focused and you want IPs nobody else has touched.
Link prospecting at volume. Froxy or Infatica, because the SERP endpoint saves you building a scraper. This is the job that eats the most requests, and it is worth reading our piece on link building tools alongside this.
Hundreds of clients across many markets. Bright Data or Oxylabs. Nothing else on this list is built for it.
Finding unlinked brand mentions. Any of them will do. The proxy is the easy part. Turning the mentions into links is the work, and we walk through that in our guide to link reclamation.
Setting proxies up for SEO work
A few rules that have saved us a lot of failed runs.
Match the IP location to the market you are checking, and store that location with the result. Rankings without a location attached are close to useless a month later.
Send about one request every four to eight seconds per IP, with a random gap. A fixed gap is a pattern.
Cap how many searches run at once. Pushing it looks great for an hour, then everything gets blocked at the same moment and you finish with nothing.
Log the status code for every request. When a job breaks with no logs, you cannot tell a block from a rate limit from a parsing bug.
Save every field on the first run. The URL, the domain, the position, the title, the description, the keyword, the date and the location. Running a scrape twice because you forgot one column is a bad way to spend a Tuesday.
Mistakes I see people make
Free proxy lists. They are slow, most of the addresses are dead, and nobody can tell you who is watching the traffic going through them. There is no version of this that ends well.
Buying on pool size. A 400 million IP pool that ten thousand people are scraping Google from is worse for you than a small pool nobody has burnt. Read the exclusivity terms, not the headline number.
Ignoring location. The most expensive mistake, because the data looks fine. You only find out when a client asks why their rankings do not match what they see.
Treating the scrape as the job. A list of five thousand URLs is not a prospect list. Most of it is publishers who will never reply and pages that matched by accident. The filtering is the work, and we cover how we judge a target in how to check backlink quality.
FAQ
Do I need proxies for rank tracking?
If you check more than a few keywords, yes. Google throttles repeated automated searches from one address quickly, and it also personalises results, so your own browser is not a neutral view.
How much bandwidth does SEO monitoring use?
Less than people expect. Search result pages are small. A few hundred keywords checked daily usually lands in single digit gigabytes per month, which is why price per gigabyte matters less here than in other scraping work.
Are residential proxies legal to use for SEO?
Using them to collect public search results is normal practice. Read the provider’s terms on how they source IPs, and do not use them to get behind a login. Our off-page SEO checklist covers where we draw the line on this.
Can I use datacenter proxies instead?
For testing a script, yes. For data going into a client report, no. Datacenter ranges are easy to identify and Google already has them listed.
Where this fits in a link building campaign
Proxies are plumbing. They get you the data. What you do with it decides whether the campaign works.
The pipeline we run is the same every time. Scrape the results for a keyword set. Clean and dedupe the domains. Filter out anything that will not reply. Enrich what is left with traffic figures and a contact. Then start outreach.
Most teams spend their effort on step one and almost none on step three, which is backwards. The scrape is the cheapest part of the whole thing.
If you would rather not build any of this, that is what our link building packages exist for. If you are building it yourself, pick a provider from the list above based on the job you are actually doing, not the biggest number on the page.
