u/bg81011

We’re running a small ecommerce monitoring tool. The goal is to check competitor prices/stock every hour across like 40 product pages. We've tried datacenter proxies from some random cheap host and sessions just drop halfway through. It sucks cause then I gotta restart the whole scraper. We need something where the session stays alive long enough to finish a batch for sure. ISP proxies keep coming up as an option too but idk if theyre actually more stable or if it's just fancy marketing. Curious to hear whats actually holding up for you guys for this kind of monitoring. What do you guys use or how do you even scrape?

This is probably THE MOST asked question ever. But genuinely need your help comparing all of them can someone share what they used and liked/disliked about the tool please? No budget for some giant enterprise platform, but apparently, atp, I deff need something that can actually show if we're getting mentioned or cited across chatgpt, gemini, claude, perplexity and others. Ideally, I need something I can dump into a simple monthly report without having to manually prompt and tinker around with it every day. If you used multiple of these, would be nice to hear why you switched and a comparison between a few. As I know people don't usually switch between these, cause they aren't super cheap to jump around from one to another, but I'm hopeful to hear some reviews from you guys.

Started planning a birthday trip with my husband and now I'm kinda spiraling over the flight prices lol. We decided on London since we're both big fans of England, but we live in Canada and everything I'm finding feels expensive. Where do you guys check for international cheap flights? We are big fans of England and would love to go there. I started to think maybe I'm not really good at searching for flights. I need honest advice.

I started learning web scraping, two weeks in now. I am making some progress, built a little python script to pull product listings off a couple sites for practice. Works fine for like 20 requests then boom, banned or captcha city. Apparently I need to switch up my proxy. I did some reading and now I'm more lost than before. Residential, datacenter, mobile, private proxy... no clue what actually matters vs whats just marketing fluff. I am still new to this and not looking for anyone to promote their businesses on this post, I need genuine advice.

First European solo trip coming up, flying from the US and I'm trying not to overpack lol. What do you girls always bring for safety or just making solo travel easier? I'm thinking power bank, spare card and a small lock but feel like I'm missing something. Also planning 2 or 3 cities while I'm there. For cheap multi city flights, do you normally book it all together or each flight separately? Any recs?

I'm pulling around 5k Google searches build a small ml dataset, mostly keyword clusters, ranking URLs and snippet data. I’ve been doing it with residential proxies, but around the 2-3k query mark I start getting blocks and captchas, then a bunch of results come back empty. Rerunning failed batches is taking more time than pulling the data itself.

Thinking a serp api makes more sense at this point. I don't need a massive enterprise setup, just consistent Google serp data without having to manage proxies and rotation myself. Anyone here using serp apis that holds up well for batches around this size? Budget isn't huge so trying not to pay for a ton of volume I won't use...

My traffic has been sliding for a couple months now. And i think I finally figured out why. I’m losing clicks to AI answers. People type a query, they get the answer right there, and bounce without ever clicking through to any of my pages. We're a local service business so this is hurting conversions. It's quite frustrating to see impressions holding steady while ctr keep on tanking. I really need to see what's going on under the hood. But Google Search Console isn't cutting it for this. Just wondering, is normal rank tracking becoming obsolete? And has anyone here dealt with this for real and if so, what tracking tool/s are you using?

Been using shared proxies for a few basic tasks and the random blocks are starting to annoy me. I'm looking at moving to a private proxy, but I'm not sure how much difference it makes in practice.

Anyone running private proxies long term? Curious if the success rate is noticeably better or if you're mostly paying to avoid sharing the IP with random users.

Been testing the Gemini api for a small llm project and it works fine at low volume, but once I run larger batches I'm getting failed requests and outputs I need to retry. I can build all the retry, parsing and fallback logic myself, but I'm wondering how people are handling this in actual projects. Are you calling Gemini directly or putting another layer in front of it?

Working on an internal dashboard at work in python. Need product prices, availability and review data pulled from a few retail and marketplace sites on a schedule. First version was just requests + bs4, worked for like a day... Now I'm getting captchas, empty responses and random layout changes depending on the site. wrote retry logic, rotated a couple free proxies, still breaks overnight and I come in to half a dataset. I'm one person and this isn't even my main project, that what annoys me the most!

Don't really want to maintain headless chrome or constantly check on proxy pools in python. Is there an api built for this that handles rendering, retries and blocks without needing constant fixes? budget is small, just need something reliable enough that I stop checking logs every morning.

Thanks in advance and sorry if this sounds more like a rant!

Running a tiny agency here, I'm not talking about whether a client gets mentioned once, I'm trying to measure whether their Google AI Overview citations are growing over time, which queries they show up for and whether any of that actually turns into traffic or conversions, because rankings alone don’t feel like the right metric anymore...

I checked the pinned list and compared a few sites, but prices are still high. I’m flying from Richmond to Lisbon with a $600 to $700 budget. I’m open to a longer route, but I’d like to avoid tight or risky connections.

Everything runs through my home connection, so the accounts seem to get linked and one ban makes the rest look suspicious. I’m looking at residential, mobile and datacenter proxies, but the advice is all over the place and I can’t spend hundreds each month. For social account management, do I need one stable proxy per account or can several accounts safely share one?

We manage around 20 clients and my boss wants proof that AI visibility tracking is worth billing for not just another SEO add on.

Right now, someone on the team manually checks prompts in ChatGPT and Perplexity each week then adds screenshots to the client report. It takes too long and the data feels hard to defend because the results can change between checks.

We’re now testing tools for prompt tracking, brand mentions, and share of voice. My main concern is whether any of them stay useful when you’re running 20 accounts at once. Is anyone tracking AI visibility at agency scale? What numbers do you show clients or management that they actually take seriously? Or you also do it manually?

Every year this happens and every year I panic a little. My dad is that guy who says "don't get me anything" and actually means it. He's got enough tools, enough golf shirts, and a whole drawer of gadgets he's used maybe once.

Honestly the last few Father's Days I just got him a card and took him out for a nice dinner because I couldn't think of anything else. But this year feels different. I want to actually do something that feels like a real gift and not just... an obligation, you know? He's turning 63. Still active, likes being outdoors, big into food but he doesn't love surprises that are too extreme so skydiving is probably out lol.

Budget wise I'm thinking somewhere around the 100 to 150 range, nothing crazy. I keep seeing these experience gift boxes where they pick their own activity later, and I kinda love the idea of him getting to choose. Has anyone actually done one of those for their dad? Did he use it or did it just end up sitting there like the golf shirts lol

One of my local service clients asks every week whether they show up in ChatGPT. I started testing real customer prompts like “best *service* near me” and “who does *thing* in *city*” then logging which brands appeared.

The issue is that the answer changes between runs so a single screenshot means very little. I'm starting to think the useful metrics are recommendation rate, repeat visibility, competitor overlap, cited sources and whether the brand gets picked for the task, not just mentioned once.

How are people tracking this over time without turning it into manual prompt checking?

So our organic traffic has been sliding for a couple months now and rankings are basically flat, which is what makes me think it's not a ranking problem. People are getting their answer straight from the AI box and never clicking through.

We're a small B2B SaaS content team. Two writers, me, that's it. I pulled GSC data and impressions are actually up on a bunch of our informational stuff but clicks are down. Classic. The comparison and "how to" posts are getting hit hardest, which tracks because those are exactly the queries AI loves to just answer for you. Honestly i'm a bit stuck on what to even do about ai visibility here. Do we lean harder into stuff that AI can't easily summarise, like our own data and opinion pieces? Do we just accept some of these top funnel posts are dead and move budget to productled content? Not gonna sure that shifting everything is the move tbh. I've read the takes about "just optimise for being cited in the answer" but nobody seems to have real numbers showing that actually drives anything...

Anyone actually seen this in their own analytics and done something that worked? Not looking for another list of tools. Just want to know what people are seeing on the ground.