What's a good proxy success rate for web scraping?

A “good” proxy success rate depends on what you mean by success, but as a rough rule:

• 90%+: very good
• 80–90%: decent/usable
• Below 80%: usually a sign you need better proxies, better rotation, or request tuning

More practical benchmarks

For web scraping, people often look at a few different success metrics:

1. Request success rate

   • % of requests that return the expected page/content
   • Good target: 95%+ for stable sites, 90%+ for tougher sites

2. Proxy availability rate

   • % of proxies that are alive and usable at any moment
   • Good target: 85–95%+ depending on provider quality

3. Block/ban rate

   • % of requests getting 403, 429, captchas, or empty/soft-block pages
   • Ideally under 5–10%

What affects the “good” number

• Target site strictness: some sites are easy, others aggressively block automated traffic
• Proxy type:
  • Datacenter proxies: cheaper, often lower success on strict sites
  • Residential proxies: usually higher success, especially for protected sites
  • Mobile proxies: often best success, usually most expensive
• Rotation strategy: bad rotation can tank success even with good proxies
• Request patterns: too fast, repetitive, or fingerprintable traffic lowers success
• Geo match: using the wrong country/region can cause failures

Rule of thumb

If you’re scraping at scale and your proxy success rate is:

• 95%+: excellent
• 85–95%: solid
• 70–85%: workable but needs tuning
• <70%: likely inefficient and costly

If you want, I can also tell you how to measure proxy success rate correctly (including how to count soft blocks and captcha pages).