Introducing Smartpath®: AI-Powered Residential Proxy Optimization That Cuts Bandwidth Costs by 40%
We're excited to announce Smartpath, our intelligent, AI-driven proxy designed to optimize your residential proxy traffic and reduce your bandwidth costs. Smartpath is available in beta starting today for all residential proxy customers, completely free of charge. Enable it instantly via your dashboard or easily integrate it into your workflow using our API with just a single parameter.
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The Problem
When using residential proxies for browsing, automation, or scraping, you typically need a genuine residential IP address to ensure smooth access without bans. However, browsers constantly load numerous additional resources behind the scenes that often don't require residential IP addresses. Unfortunately, these unnecessary requests consume expensive residential bandwidth, increasing your costs without providing additional benefits.
We identified this inefficiency after we launched our observability suite and dug in to how our customers are really utilizing our proxy network. We were shocked to discover that, to our initial estimates, approximately 35% of all traffic through our residential network might not need to use residential IPs at all.
Many experienced customers are aware of this issue and their ways you can optimize traffic flow locally by blocking specific resource requests that aren’t related to your core use-case.
Notably, web scraping expert Pierluigi Vinciguerra highlights such strategies on his blog (here and here). However, these manual optimizations have some limitations:
- Time-consuming implementation
- Technical complexity and specialized knowledge required
- Brittleness (requiring constant adjustments as websites change)
- Lack of control in off-the-shelf solutions (bots, browser extensions, etc.)
It was obvious to us after our network analysis that our customers weren’t widely deploying these strategies and as such, may be wasting their residential proxy bandwidth (and money) on requests that could be optimized. That didn’t sit right with us, so we began thinking of a solution…
The Solution. Smartpath.
Recognizing these challenges, we leveraged our proprietary technology stack – including Ancelotti, our Rust-based proxy server, and Carlo, our business logic engine – to develop a better way to optimize traffic. Our goal was to create a system that requires zero setup from customers, automatically saves bandwidth across most use-cases (hopefully all), and continuously improves itself over time. After a lot of work and sleepless nights, we built Smartpath – an AI system that intelligently determines whether each request genuinely requires a residential IP.
Using artificial intelligence and leveraging big data provided by our observability infrastructure, Smartpath can evaluate requests on the fly and route non-essential requests through datacenter IPs at no charge, seamlessly optimizing your residential proxy traffic and saving you money.
Smartpath continuously learns from the hundreds of millions of requests that flow through our network each day, ensuring consistently high accuracy, even when websites update and change.
Does it work?!
Smartpath has been deployed in our testnet for approximately a month now and we’ve been testing its effectiveness across popular workloads, using off-the-shelf tooling that is widely accepted by the industry, specifically using Apify and ScrapingBee. We evaluated two key metrics:
- Bandwidth savings
- Success rate
Our final analysis covered 10,000 randomly selected pages from major websites including Amazon, Reddit, Footlocker, ASOS, Target, Redfin, Trustpilot, and Bloomberg using the ScrapingBee API and APIFY Crawler. We were pretty happy with the results…
- Average bandwidth savings: 40.79%
- Maximum bandwidth savings (Reddit): 61.35%
- No material reduction in request success rates compared to standard residential proxies
These results clearly demonstrate Smartpath’s capability to significantly reduce costs without compromising performance.
How do I use it?
Enabling Smartpath is straightforward:
- Activate with a single click in your dashboard under your residential generator settings.
- For API-based list generation, simply include one additional parameter.
Additionally, our enhanced logging and observability suite now features Smartpath integration, allowing you to monitor bandwidth savings and financial benefits directly.
While in beta, Smartpath is robust across most applications, although we recommend cautious use for specific scenarios, particularly ad verification tasks.
What’s next?
We are committed to continuously enhancing Smartpath throughout the beta period with a focus on improving accuracy, reducing response times, and expanding applicability across even more use-cases. Future updates will include additional tools enabling users to report and manage potential false positives.
We invite you to experience smarter, more cost-effective residential proxy usage—activate Smartpath today.
