The State of Web Scraping Report 2026, produced by Apify and The Web Scraping Club, has just published some very telling numbers.
According to the report, 65.8 percent of web scraping professionals used more proxies in 2025 than the year before.
And 58.3 percent of them increased their proxy spending budgets — even though the price per gigabyte of proxy data has actually gone down in recent years.
This might seem strange. If prices are lower, why are teams spending more? The answer is volume and complexity.
Web Scraping Proxy Budget: Why Are Teams Using More Proxies?
The reason proxy usage and costs are both growing is that websites are getting harder to scrape. Anti-bot technology used by companies like Cloudflare, Amazon, and Google has become much more aggressive.
Cloudflare’s 2026 bot detection now requires a full browser to be running just to solve its JavaScript challenges — not just a token. Amazon blocks data center IP addresses immediately.
Google shows a CAPTCHA after just three requests from a suspicious address. Scraping teams need more proxy requests to get the same amount of data that was easier to collect two or three years ago.
Another key finding from the report is that teams are using more than one proxy provider at a time. Forty-three percent of professionals now use two to three different proxy providers simultaneously.
Twelve percent use four to five. This multi-provider approach is a safety strategy. When one proxy network goes down — as happened with IPIDEA in January 2026 when nine million devices went offline — teams with only one provider lose everything.
Having backup providers keeps data collection running even during major network outages.
Also read about: Agentic Proxy Model: AI Becomes Brand Gatekeeper
What Types of Proxies Are Working Best in 2026?
In terms of which proxy types are working best, ISP proxies are gaining ground fast. These are real IP addresses from internet service providers, hosted on fast and stable data center infrastructure.
They combine the trust of residential IPs with the speed and reliability of data center servers.
For businesses that need both high success rates and stable connections, ISP proxies are increasingly the best option. Pure rotating residential proxies are getting flagged faster by modern anti-bot systems.
The practical advice for anyone running web scraping operations in 2026 is to audit your current proxy setup. If you rely on a single provider, add a backup.
If you are still using basic rotating residential proxies for high-protection targets, test ISP proxies instead.
Measure your actual cost per successful request — not just your cost per gigabyte — and you may find that a slightly more expensive proxy delivers much better value when you account for higher success rates.
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