Residential proxies have moved from a niche tool of scraping services to a measurable driver of internet traffic, with cybersecurity company Infoblox reporting that monthly DNS queries to residential proxy domains rose from roughly 400 billion to more than 500 billion between January 2025 and April 2026, an increase of about 25%. The same report states that AI has become a major driver of demand for these addresses, because models need a constant flow of current data and residential proxies let scrapers bypass anti-bot measures by appearing to come from ordinary home connections.
What the Infoblox data shows
Infoblox analyzed DNS traffic across its customer base and recorded the growth in queries to residential proxy domains over fifteen months. The company attributes the rise to several factors, naming AI-related training, which often requires scraping websites, as a major one. Cloudflare adds a second measurement to the same picture: crawling for training data accounted for 80% of all AI bot activity in the period it studied, and the new generation of AI-focused scrapers is, in its wording, designed to blend in by rotating IP addresses through residential proxies, generating human-like user agents and mimicking plausible browsing patterns.
Technically, a residential proxy is the IP address of a broadband user. That address reaches the market in three ways: the user sells a safe-looking location to a commercial company so its customers can route traffic through it and avoid blacklists; the user provides the service unpaid because it arrived with an app for an appliance; or the user's device has been drawn into a botnet. Traffic routed through such an address looks like it comes from a real person's device, which makes blocks and interventions less likely. Most hosts sell access through a range of apps, led at the moment by Honeygain, with earnings averaging between $0.10 and $0.80 per GB of traffic.
The demand is being met by a market where residential proxy access is usually sold as a premium tier of web-scraping services. Bright Data offers a 798GB bandwidth residential proxy package at $2,000 a month; FireCrawl charges $8-15 per GB; Apify around $8. Many other major providers hide their charges behind a contact sales request, and the advertised lower tiers can be read as trailers for that conversation, because data-hungry AI companies have what the source calls life-changing money to spend on the problem. The alternative for a buyer is a standard VPN, which in most cases gives a stale IP address tied to a chosen country, already present on the blocklists that portals maintain.
What this means for companies buying data access
For a business that collects public web data for models, analytics or market monitoring, the practical consequence is that the cheap and stable part of the pipeline is getting more expensive and more visible. A small company that previously relied on a standard VPN or a low-tier scraping plan now faces per-gigabyte pricing in the $8-15 range or a monthly commitment measured in thousands of dollars, while a large buyer can negotiate a contract and absorb the cost. The same shift changes the skill set: someone has to manage proxy pools, monitor block rates and decide when a target is worth the premium bandwidth rather than assuming that any scraper will keep working.
What this news does not mean is that residential proxies are illegal or that every use is a violation. The source notes they are far from an illicit activity at the moment, but also that, like all technologies that facilitate anonymization, they are coming under fire as a favored tool for cybercriminals, notably in Japan. For a company choosing a vendor, the questions worth asking are where the IP addresses come from, whether the provider can document consent from the hosts, how it handles rotation and blocklists, and what happens to a project if a jurisdiction restricts the service. The Infoblox figure measures DNS queries, not confirmed scraping volume, so it is a signal of demand rather than proof of how much data AI companies actually ingest.
The marker to watch over the next twelve months is whether residential proxies follow the path the source describes for VPNs: from a corporate tool to a technology named in legislation, committees and oversight, as age-gating rules spread in the UK, the EU and Australia. If regulators begin to treat proxy providers the way some states already treat VPNs, the cost and availability of training data will change for every company that depends on it, and procurement teams will need a fallback plan before that happens.
