Proxy infrastructure for AI agents
Autonomous agents browse the web thousands of times a day — and datacenter egress plus a headless fingerprint is exactly what anti-bot vendors profile hardest. If your agent stack keeps hitting CAPTCHAs and 403s, the network layer is the problem, not the model.
Top-6 providers for this task
PROXYDECK editorial estimate based on tests over the past 6 months. We weighed success rate on this exact target, price, use-case tolerance, and compliance.
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How to set up — step by step
1. Route agent traffic through residential or an unlocker
Agent requests from cloud ASNs (AWS, GCP) with automation fingerprints get the strictest anti-bot treatment on the modern web. Two workable routes: rotating residential for ordinary pages, or an unlocker-class API (Web Unlocker, Zyte API) for hardened targets — the API route also offloads JS rendering, which most agent frameworks handle poorly.
2. One session per task, not per request
An agent completing a multi-step task (search → open → paginate → extract) should hold one sticky session for the whole task and rotate between tasks. Per-request rotation mid-task breaks cookies and cart state and triples your block rate; per-task sessions mirror human browsing.
3. Cache aggressively — agents re-visit constantly
Agent loops re-fetch the same URLs at rates no human ever would. A response cache keyed by URL + task context, even with a 5-minute TTL, typically cuts bandwidth spend 40–70% and hides your retry patterns from rate limiters.
4. Give the agent a block-handling policy
Teach the loop what a soft block looks like (403, 429, CAPTCHA markers in the DOM) and what to do: retry once through a fresh session, escalate to the unlocker route, or skip and log. An agent without this policy burns budget hammering a wall.
⚡ Cost sanity-check before you scale
Price an agent run before shipping: (average pages per task) × (average page weight ≈ 1.5 MB with assets stripped) × (tasks per day) × (per-GB rate). A 20-page task on $3/GB residential costs ~$0.09; the same task through a per-request unlocker at $2/1000 requests costs ~$0.04 — the API route is often cheaper once retries are counted, and always cheaper in engineering time.