SERP tracking has a brutal economics problem: each query is cheap, but blocked queries cost as much as successful ones and search engines block aggressively from datacenter ranges. The fix is residential exits with strict rotation - one query per IP keeps per-IP counts at exactly 1, which is the cleanest profile a request can have.
What a SERP setup needs from a proxy
- Country & language targeting. Query Google from the exact country and locale your users see - country-us, country-jp and 200+ more in the username, at no extra cost.
- Strict rotation. Round-robin mode gives a fresh household IP per query automatically.
- Per-GB billing. SERP pages are small; you pay for what you actually pull, with tiered pricing from $1.20 down to $0.60/GB.
What does SERP tracking cost?
A SERP HTML page is small - typically 200-500 KB. At $1.20/GB, 100,000 queries at ~350 KB each consume roughly 35 GB, or about $42 on the entry tier - and less at higher tiers. Your real number depends on success rate and page size per locale; measure it on your own keyword set rather than trusting any estimate.
Test on your own target list
Residential from $1.20/GB · static ISP from $2/IP per month (15+ IPs) · no monthly commitment. Create an account, top up a small balance and run your first requests in minutes.
Create accountBest practices for SERP collection
- One query per IP. Round-robin rotation gives you this for free - resist the urge to reuse an exit for "related" keywords, because clusters of queries from one address are exactly what engines score.
- Pin the locale, not just the country. Language parameters (gl, hl, lr) belong in the request URL; the country parameter belongs in the proxy username. Getting both right is the difference between "results from country X" and "results in language Y about country X".
- Cache aggressively. Keywords that rank stable for weeks do not need hourly re-checks - tier your keyword list into fast lanes (money keywords, daily) and slow lanes (long-tail, weekly) and cut traffic dramatically without losing signal.
- Measure success rate per locale. A 97% success rate on google.com can coexist with 80% on a local engine - budget for the worst locale, not the average.
The Web Unlocker (launching soon, billed per successful request) handles the CAPTCHA-and-retry layer for you and returns final HTML - useful when you would rather pay per result than manage rotation logic yourself.