GatherProxy.com is gone, and has been for six years. It ran a free tool for gathering, filtering and checking public proxies from April 2013 until February 2020. By June 2020 the domain showed a registrar parking page. On 6 September 2026 it still does. The name has never changed hands: the same 2013 registration is renewed into 2027 and pointed at a parking service. About 110 people a month still search for it (Keyword Planner, September 2026). At least one roundup published in April 2026 still lists it among the five best free proxy lists. This is the record, and what to use now.
Every date below comes from the Internet Archive's captures, the .com registry, and requests we made ourselves on 6 September 2026. Where the record is silent, this page says so.
What GatherProxy was
The domain was registered on 26 April 2013 (registry record, read 6 September 2026). The first archived capture is dated the next day. It shows a page titled "Free Gathering, Filtering & Checking Proxies Online Tool", with a logo still marked "Beta". The pitch is one every free list has made since: "Collect unlimited free working public proxies. Get daily fresh proxies. Our proxy lists are checked in real-time with up to the minute auto-updatable results 24/7." Under it sat filters for country, ports, anonymity level and response time.
By June 2016 the tool had become a suite, and the page said so in its own words: "gatherproxy.com is a website that deals in offering proxy server lists, socks list, web proxy list, online proxy checker, and proxy scraper tool." It made two freshness claims that no capture measures. One: "The proxies given by gatherproxy.com are tracked all the time to make sure that the user can work with a list of perfectly working proxies that have worked for the past 24 hours." The other: "Our proxies are updated each and every seconds." The June 2018 capture carries the same text, word for word. The page did not change for at least two years.
No capture we read shows a price or a paid plan. As far as the record goes, GatherProxy was free from its first day to its last.
| Capture | Page title | What the site showed |
|---|---|---|
| 27 April 2013 | Free Gathering, Filtering & Checking Proxies Online Tool | a beta tool with country, port, anonymity and speed filters |
| 1 June 2016 | Free proxy list online - Free proxy servers list - Online proxy checker - Socks list | lists, a socks list, a web proxy list, a checker and a scraper |
| 1 June 2018 | same | the same page text as 2016, unchanged |
| 2 February 2020 | same | the last capture of the working site |
| 4 March and 3 April 2020 | redirect | two redirects, then a 502 error on 1 May |
| 7 June 2020 | gatherproxy.com - Registered at Namecheap.com | a registrar parking page |
| 6 September 2026 | Redirecting... | an 84-word parking page on parking nameservers |
Source for every row: the Internet Archive capture of that date, and our own request on 6 September 2026.
When it died, from the archive record
The Internet Archive holds 105 monthly captures of gatherproxy.com, from 27 April 2013 to 10 May 2026. The site was captured in every month of 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019. The chart shows the months captured per year. The drop after 2020 is the death: one capture in 2021, one in 2022, all of them parking or empty pages.
The end is narrow. The capture of 2 February 2020 is the working site, 32 kilobytes, the same page as in 2019. The captures of 4 March and 3 April 2020 are redirects. The capture of 1 May 2020 is a 502 error. The capture of 7 June 2020 is titled "gatherproxy.com - Registered at Namecheap.com". That is a registrar's parking page, the page a domain shows when nothing is hosted behind it. So the tool stopped between February and June 2020.
The registry shows what happened to the name after that: nothing. The record read on 6 September 2026 carries the same registration since 26 April 2013, at NameCheap. It was updated on 28 May 2026 and runs to 26 April 2027, with the domain on parking nameservers. Whoever built GatherProxy in 2013 still pays for the name and lets it sit.
What the record does not say
No capture carries a closing note. The site did not announce that it was shutting down. The person who keeps renewing the name has not said why. The freshness claims, "checked in real-time" in 2013 and "updated each and every seconds" in 2016, are the site's own. We never measured them, and as far as we can find, nobody did. Whether the tool made money is unknown; no capture shows a price.
The roundups that still recommend it
This is the part that keeps the search alive. A roundup of the five best free proxy lists for web scraping, published on 9 April 2026, ranks GatherProxy fourth. Under its entry, the same article prints: "(At the time of writing, this service was down)". A reader who follows that recommendation lands on a parking page, six years after the tool stopped. Two directory sites that rank for the name, a traffic estimator and a site-safety card, describe the domain under the parking page's own title, "Redirecting...". Neither carries any history.
That is the pattern across the free-list world. In our survey of 69 free proxy sites on 6 September 2026, 22 were dead, parked, absorbed or for sale. Several of them still appear in lists of the best.
What to use instead
The honest replacement for a free proxy tool is a free proxy list that proves its entries answer. On 6 September 2026 we fetched every free list that was still alive. We took up to 200 entries from each. Each entry had to relay a real request and come back with an exit address that was not ours.
| List | Entries tested | Relayed a request |
|---|---|---|
| free-proxy-list.net | 200 | 86 |
| monosans proxy-list (GitHub) | 200 | 62 |
| iplocate free-proxy-list (GitHub) | 200 | 51 |
| proxifly free-proxy-list (GitHub) | 200 | 36 |
| geonode free list | 200 | 15 |
| hide.mn list | 64 | 0 |
No list relayed more than half of what it published. That is the base rate of free proxies, not a fault of any one site, and it is why GatherProxy was built around a checker in the first place. Whatever list you pick, check an entry before you use it.
GatherProxy's three jobs still exist as free tools. Its list is our free proxy list, with a page per country. Its checker is our proxy checker, which tests any list you paste in with the same relay rule. Its scraper is the free API behind the list, documented at /docs/free-proxy-list. The same week as this test we found our own verifier accepting decoy servers that answer every request and forward nothing. We replaced it. A proxy is now marked alive only when our own test request came back through it, carrying a code we sent, on every protocol. The list is re-verifying under that rule as you read this.
Free lists have a ceiling that no amount of checking removes. Every address on them is public, shared with everyone who found the same list, and already known to the sites people most want to reach. When a job needs an exit that stays up, keeps a session and has not been handed around, that is a paid proxy, billed by the gigabyte. The free list stays the place to test first.
Sources
- Internet Archive captures of gatherproxy.com dated 27 April 2013, 1 June 2016, 1 June 2018, 2 February 2020, 4 March 2020, 3 April 2020, 1 May 2020 and 7 June 2020, read on 6 September 2026.
- Internet Archive CDX index for gatherproxy.com, one row per captured month, read on 6 September 2026.
- The .com registry record for gatherproxy.com (whois), read on 6 September 2026.
- Google Ads Keyword Planner, monthly searches for "gatherproxy", September 2026.
- The roundup "5 Best Free Proxy Lists for Web Scraping (2026)", published 9 April 2026, quoted for what it recommends.
- HProxy measurements on 6 September 2026: one request to gatherproxy.com, the survey of 69 free proxy sites, and the same-hour relay test of alive free lists.