# Shifter > Shifter operates one of the original residential proxy networks, founded in 2012. 205M+ residential IPs across 195+ countries serve 50,000+ customers worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies. Products include residential proxies, ISP (static residential) proxies, a managed Web Scraping API, and a SERP API. Bandwidth-priced from $1.00/GB. Contact: hi@shifter.io · Status: https://status.shifter.io · Docs: https://shifter.io/docs ## Products - [Residential Proxies](https://shifter.io/services/residential-proxies): residential proxies IPs with city and ASN-level targeting, sticky sessions, HTTP(S) and SOCKS5. - [ISP Proxies](https://shifter.io/services/isp-proxies): static residential IPs from Tier-1 ISPs, unlimited bandwidth, gigabit speeds. - [Web Scraping API](https://shifter.io/services/scraping-api): managed REST API with JS rendering, CAPTCHA solving, structured output. - [SERP API](https://shifter.io/services/serp-api): real-time structured search results from Google, Bing, Yandex, Amazon. ## Pricing - [Pricing overview](https://shifter.io/pricing) - [Residential Proxies pricing](https://shifter.io/pricing/residential-proxies) - [ISP Proxies pricing](https://shifter.io/pricing/isp-proxies) - [Scraping API pricing](https://shifter.io/pricing/scraping-api) - [SERP API pricing](https://shifter.io/pricing/serp-api) ## API quick reference Residential Proxies gateway (one endpoint for all locations and sessions): - Host `p.shifter.io`, port `443`. HTTP(S) and SOCKS5. - Auth + targeting are encoded in the username; password is constant. Example: `customer-USERNAME-country-us-city-new_york-sid-9f3a2b7c-ttl-600:PASSWORD@p.shifter.io:443`. - Username flags: `country`, `state`, `city`, `asn`, `sid` (session id), `ttl` (sticky seconds, only valid with `sid`). Flag order does not matter; omit `sid` for rotating IPs. Proxy management REST API (geo lookups, source-IP whitelist, proxy lists): - Residential base `https://shifter.io/api/v1/residential` — auth via `api_key` query param. - ISP base `https://shifter.io/api/v1/static-residential/{membership}` — auth via `api_token` query param. - Legacy base `https://shifter.io/api/v1/backconnect` — auth via `api_token` query param. - Keys/tokens are created in the panel under Account → API Keys / API Tokens. Data APIs: - Web Scraping API: `GET https://scrape.shifter.io/v1?api_key=KEY&url=...` (POST/PUT supported; `render_js`, `wait_for_css`, `keep_headers`, `webhook` options). - SERP API: `GET https://serp.shifter.io/v1?engine=google&api_key=KEY&q=...` (engines: google, bing, yandex; city-level geo). - Amazon/ecommerce: `GET https://ecom.shifter.io/v1?engine=amazon&api_key=KEY&q=...`. Errors return standard HTTP status codes with a JSON `{error, message}` body; retry `429`/`5xx` with backoff. - [Full REST API reference](https://shifter.io/docs/api/) - [Gateway & authentication](https://shifter.io/docs/products/residential-proxies/gateway-and-auth/) ## Company - [About Shifter](https://shifter.io/about-us) - [Contact](https://shifter.io/contact) - [Press & media](https://shifter.io/press) - [Affiliate Program](https://shifter.io/affiliate): up to 20% commission on every Shifter referral, $1,500 max per sale, 30-day cookie, $100 minimum monthly payout. - [Privacy Policy](https://shifter.io/privacy-policy) - [Cookie Notice](https://shifter.io/cookie) - [Terms of Service](https://shifter.io/terms-and-conditions) ## Use cases - [Web Scraping](https://shifter.io/use-cases/web-scraping): Collect data from any website at scale without getting blocked. - [SEO Monitoring](https://shifter.io/use-cases/seo-monitoring): Track Google rankings, local pack positions, and SERP features across thousands of keywords and cities. - [Brand Monitoring](https://shifter.io/use-cases/social-listening): Track brand mentions, sentiment, and conversation volume across social networks, forums, and review platforms. - [Lead Generation](https://shifter.io/use-cases/lead-generation): Power B2B sales intelligence, prospecting, and lead-enrichment platforms. - [Ad Verification](https://shifter.io/use-cases/ad-verification): Verify that display, video, and search ads serve correctly to target audiences across geos and devices. - [Brand Protection](https://shifter.io/use-cases/brand-protection): Detect counterfeits, impersonators, unauthorized resellers, and trademark violations across global marketplaces. - [Media & Content Protection](https://shifter.io/use-cases/media-protection): Detect piracy, unauthorized streams, and content leaks across global content networks. - [Market Research](https://shifter.io/use-cases/market-research): Power competitive intelligence, market sizing, and category analytics with residential-grade data from every market. - [Data Gathering](https://shifter.io/use-cases/data-gathering): Build pipelines that pull structured data from any public source on the web. - [Competitive Intelligence](https://shifter.io/use-cases/competitive-intelligence): Track competitor product launches, pricing, hiring, and positioning in real-time. - [KYC & AML Screening](https://shifter.io/use-cases/kyc-aml): Power KYC, AML, and counterparty-screening platforms with continuously refreshed sanctions, PEP, and adverse-media data. - [Localization & QA](https://shifter.io/use-cases/localization-qa): Test how your product, content, and ads render to real users in every market. - [Fraud Detection](https://shifter.io/use-cases/fraud-detection): Power application, transaction, and account fraud detection with residential-grade signals from across the open web. - [Content Moderation](https://shifter.io/use-cases/content-moderation): Power trust & safety operations across user-generated content, ads, and listings. - [AI Agents](https://shifter.io/use-cases/ai-agents): Power autonomous LLM agents that browse the web on behalf of users. - [Public Records](https://shifter.io/use-cases/public-records): Aggregate court records, regulatory filings, business registries, and government data across global jurisdictions. - [VPN Alternative for Data Work](https://shifter.io/use-cases/vpn-alternative): Why residential proxies are the right tool for ad verification, geo-QA, market research, and any data work that needs a real-user view in another market — not a VPN. - [Multi-Account Management](https://shifter.io/use-cases/account-management): Run and manage many accounts in parallel without bans or linking. ## Integrations - [Python](https://shifter.io/integrations/python): python. - [Node.js](https://shifter.io/integrations/nodejs): javascript. - [PHP](https://shifter.io/integrations/php): php. - [Go](https://shifter.io/integrations/go): go. - [Ruby](https://shifter.io/integrations/ruby): ruby. - [Java](https://shifter.io/integrations/java): java. - [C# / .NET](https://shifter.io/integrations/csharp): csharp. - [Puppeteer](https://shifter.io/integrations/puppeteer): javascript. - [Playwright](https://shifter.io/integrations/playwright): javascript. - [Selenium](https://shifter.io/integrations/selenium): python. - [Scrapy](https://shifter.io/integrations/scrapy): python. - [Cheerio](https://shifter.io/integrations/cheerio): javascript. - [Beautiful Soup](https://shifter.io/integrations/beautifulsoup): python. - [n8n](https://shifter.io/integrations/n8n): json. - [Zapier](https://shifter.io/integrations/zapier): javascript. - [Make](https://shifter.io/integrations/make): json. - [Postman](https://shifter.io/integrations/postman): json. - [Apify](https://shifter.io/integrations/apify): javascript. ## Comparisons - [Shifter vs Bright Data](https://shifter.io/alternative/bright-data) - [Shifter vs Oxylabs](https://shifter.io/alternative/oxylabs) - [Shifter vs Smartproxy](https://shifter.io/alternative/smartproxy) - [Shifter vs Decodo](https://shifter.io/alternative/decodo) - [Shifter vs SOAX](https://shifter.io/alternative/soax) - [Shifter vs IPRoyal](https://shifter.io/alternative/iproyal) - [Shifter vs Nimbleway](https://shifter.io/alternative/nimbleway) - [Shifter vs NetNut](https://shifter.io/alternative/netnut) - [Shifter vs IPIDEA](https://shifter.io/alternative/ipidea) - [Shifter vs Infatica](https://shifter.io/alternative/infatica) - [Shifter vs Webshare](https://shifter.io/alternative/webshare) - [Shifter vs Proxy Cheap](https://shifter.io/alternative/proxy-cheap) - [Shifter vs Rayobyte](https://shifter.io/alternative/rayobyte) - [Shifter vs PacketStream](https://shifter.io/alternative/packetstream) ## Top proxy locations - [United States](https://shifter.io/location/usa) - [India](https://shifter.io/location/india) - [China](https://shifter.io/location/china) - [Mexico](https://shifter.io/location/mexico) - [Brazil](https://shifter.io/location/brazil) - [Turkey](https://shifter.io/location/turkey) - [Indonesia](https://shifter.io/location/indonesia) - [Vietnam](https://shifter.io/location/vietnam) - [United Kingdom](https://shifter.io/location/united-kingdom) - [Spain](https://shifter.io/location/spain) - [Argentina](https://shifter.io/location/argentina) - [France](https://shifter.io/location/france) - [Ukraine](https://shifter.io/location/ukraine) - [Italy](https://shifter.io/location/italy) - [Canada](https://shifter.io/location/canada) - [Germany](https://shifter.io/location/germany) - [Philippines](https://shifter.io/location/philippines) - [Taiwan](https://shifter.io/location/taiwan) - [Bangladesh](https://shifter.io/location/bangladesh) - [Pakistan](https://shifter.io/location/pakistan) - [Egypt](https://shifter.io/location/egypt) - [Japan](https://shifter.io/location/japan) - [Colombia](https://shifter.io/location/colombia) - [South Korea](https://shifter.io/location/south-korea) - [Poland](https://shifter.io/location/poland) - [All 195+ countries](https://shifter.io/locations) ## Glossary - [Residential Proxy](https://shifter.io/glossary/residential-proxy): A residential proxy is a proxy server that routes your internet traffic through an IP address assigned by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to a real residential device, making your requests appear as genuine consumer traffic. - [Datacenter Proxy](https://shifter.io/glossary/datacenter-proxy): A datacenter proxy is a proxy server whose IP address comes from a cloud or hosting provider, rather than an Internet Service Provider serving real consumer households. - [ISP Proxy](https://shifter.io/glossary/isp-proxy): An ISP proxy is a static residential proxy where the IP address is registered with an Internet Service Provider but hosted in a datacenter, giving you a fixed residential-grade IP with datacenter speed and stability. - [Mobile Proxy](https://shifter.io/glossary/mobile-proxy): A mobile proxy is a proxy server that routes your traffic through an IP address assigned by a mobile carrier (3G, 4G, or 5G) to a real smartphone or tablet, carrying the highest trust score with anti-bot systems. - [SOCKS5 Proxy](https://shifter.io/glossary/socks5-proxy): A SOCKS5 proxy is a proxy server that uses the SOCKS5 protocol to forward arbitrary TCP and UDP traffic between a client and a destination, without parsing or modifying the application-layer payload. - [Rotating Proxy](https://shifter.io/glossary/rotating-proxy): A rotating proxy is a proxy service that automatically assigns a different IP address to each request (or at fixed time intervals) by drawing from a pool of available IPs. - [IP Rotation](https://shifter.io/glossary/ip-rotation): IP rotation is the practice of switching the source IP address of outgoing requests on a defined cadence (per request, per time window, or per session) to distribute traffic across many IPs and avoid per-IP rate limits. - [Sticky Session](https://shifter.io/glossary/sticky-session): A sticky session is a proxy configuration that pins the same exit IP to a client for a defined window or for the lifetime of a session ID, instead of rotating to a new IP per request. - [Geo-Targeting](https://shifter.io/glossary/geo-targeting): Geo-targeting in proxy services is the ability to choose the geographic location of your exit IP — by country, region, state, city, or ASN — so that destination sites see your traffic as originating from that specific market. - [IP Pool](https://shifter.io/glossary/ip-pool): An IP pool is the collection of IP addresses a proxy provider can assign as exit IPs for customer traffic, typically spanning many subnets, ASNs, and geographies. - [Proxy Server](https://shifter.io/glossary/proxy-server): A proxy server is an intermediary system that sits between a client and a destination server, forwarding requests on behalf of the client and returning the destination's responses, typically to mask the client's IP, control access, or apply policy. - [CAPTCHA](https://shifter.io/glossary/captcha): A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a challenge-response system websites use to distinguish human visitors from automated bots, typically by asking the visitor to solve a puzzle that's easy for humans but difficult for software. - [Browser Fingerprinting](https://shifter.io/glossary/browser-fingerprinting): Browser fingerprinting is a technique websites use to identify and track visitors by collecting a set of attributes from the browser (User-Agent, screen size, fonts, plugins, canvas hash, WebGL signatures, etc.) and combining them into a unique signature. - [TLS Fingerprint](https://shifter.io/glossary/tls-fingerprint): A TLS fingerprint is a hash derived from the specific structure of a client's TLS handshake (cipher list, extensions, ALPN values, GREASE bytes, etc.) that identifies the underlying HTTP client, browser, or library before any application-layer data is exchanged. - [Headless Browser](https://shifter.io/glossary/headless-browser): A headless browser is a real web browser running without a graphical user interface, controlled programmatically through APIs like Chrome DevTools Protocol or WebDriver, used for automated testing, scraping, and rendering JavaScript-heavy pages. - [User Agent](https://shifter.io/glossary/user-agent): A User-Agent is an HTTP request header that identifies the client software making the request — typically including browser name, version, OS, and rendering engine — like 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'. - [Web Scraping](https://shifter.io/glossary/web-scraping): Web scraping is the automated extraction of structured data from websites using HTTP requests, browser automation, or APIs, typically for use in analytics, monitoring, research, or downstream applications. - [SERP Scraping](https://shifter.io/glossary/serp-scraping): SERP scraping is the practice of programmatically extracting search engine results page (SERP) data — organic listings, ads, snippets, knowledge panels, local packs — from Google, Bing, Yandex, or other search engines, typically for SEO monitoring, ad-spend analysis, or rank tracking. - [Price Monitoring](https://shifter.io/glossary/price-monitoring): Price monitoring is the systematic, often automated tracking of product prices across competitor websites and marketplaces, used to inform dynamic pricing, MAP enforcement, competitive intelligence, and category analytics. - [Ad Verification](https://shifter.io/glossary/ad-verification): Ad verification is the practice of programmatically auditing where, when, and how digital ads actually appear — checking placement, viewability, brand-safety context, geo-targeting accuracy, and fraud signals — usually by visiting publisher pages from real consumer IPs and capturing what the page renders. - [Brand Protection](https://shifter.io/glossary/brand-protection): Brand protection is the systematic monitoring of online channels — marketplaces, social media, search results, paid ads, and the open web — to detect counterfeit listings, trademark abuse, impersonator accounts, and unauthorized resellers, then enforce against them. - [HTTP Proxy](https://shifter.io/glossary/http-proxy): An HTTP proxy is a proxy server that understands and forwards HTTP (and via the CONNECT method, HTTPS) traffic, operating at the application layer and able to inspect, modify, or cache request and response data for plain HTTP. - [ASN](https://shifter.io/glossary/asn): An ASN (Autonomous System Number) is a globally unique identifier assigned to a network operator (ISP, hosting provider, enterprise) by IANA, used in BGP routing to define which IP ranges that operator announces to the internet. - [Rate Limiting](https://shifter.io/glossary/rate-limiting): Rate limiting is a server-side defense that caps how many requests a single client (identified by IP, account, or session) can make in a given time window, used to protect infrastructure, prevent abuse, and ensure fair resource usage. - [robots.txt](https://shifter.io/glossary/robots-txt): robots.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a website (e.g. example.com/robots.txt) that tells web crawlers which URLs the site owner does or doesn't want them to access, following the Robots Exclusion Protocol. - [Sneaker Bot](https://shifter.io/glossary/sneaker-bot): A sneaker bot is automated software designed to purchase limited-release sneakers (or other limited-stock items) the moment they go on sale, by completing checkout faster than a human can — typically requires fast residential or ISP proxies to avoid per-IP purchase limits. ## Recent blog posts - [What Are Residential Proxies?](https://shifter.io/blog/what-are-residential-proxies): What are residential proxies? Learn how they work, why teams use them for web data collection, and where they fit in large-scale proxy infrastructure. - [Introducing the New Shifter Residential Proxies](https://shifter.io/blog/introducing-the-new-shifter-residential-proxies): A new gateway model with improved speed, 205M+ residential IPs, bandwidth-based pricing, and precision targeting by country, region, city, and ASN. - [AI Agents on the Web: The New Traffic Shape](https://shifter.io/blog/ai-agents-on-the-web-the-new-traffic-shape): Browser-using AI agents are a different kind of visitor: bursty, multi-step, latency-sensitive, geographically specific. The infrastructure question. - [The Anatomy of a Residential IP: What Target Sites Actually See](https://shifter.io/blog/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 looks at when it decides whether to serve you the real page. - [ISP Proxies: The Middle Ground Between Datacenter and Residential](https://shifter.io/blog/isp-proxies-the-middle-ground-between-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. - [Why LLMs Need Residential Proxies for AI Grounding](https://shifter.io/blog/ai-grounding-why-llms-need-residential-proxies): Modern AI systems retrieve from the live web at inference time. The reliability of that retrieval depends on whether the upstream IP is one sites trust. - [Bandwidth-Priced Residential Proxies: Why the Per-Port Era Is Over](https://shifter.io/blog/bandwidth-priced-residential-proxies-the-per-port-era-is-over): Port-based proxy plans made sense in 2012. They stopped making sense around 2020. How the industry settled on bandwidth pricing and what it means for buyers. - [Why the Open Web Matters More in the AI Era](https://shifter.io/blog/why-the-open-web-matters-in-the-ai-era): Paywalls, login walls, and app-first content keep narrowing the open web. AI grounding makes that narrowing more expensive. The case for public web access. - [From CAPTCHAs to Network-Level Defense: How Anti-Bot Evolved](https://shifter.io/blog/from-captchas-to-network-level-defense-how-anti-bot-evolved): A decade of cat-and-mouse between scrapers and defenders, and where the line has settled. What's changed, what hasn't, and what data teams should do about it. - [Introducing Ice Payments on Shifter](https://shifter.io/blog/introducing-ice-payments-on-shifter): Discover seamless crypto transactions with Ice payments on Shifter. Streamline your proxy service purchases and unlock new opportunities with Ice integration. ## Optional - [API documentation](https://shifter.io/docs/api/): full reference for proxy gateways, scraping API, SERP API. - [Full LLM index](https://shifter.io/llms-full.txt): expanded version of this file with inline descriptions. - [Sitemap](https://shifter.io/sitemap.xml)