Proxy tier benchmark › Targets

Do you need a proxy for the Minnesota business filings search?

State business entity registries · minimum viable tier: no proxy needed · measured 2026-08-18

No. The Minnesota business filings search returned the expected content on 10 of 10 unproxied requests (100%), and on the rotating datacenter and rotating anti-detect arms as well. Minnesota is one of only three state business registries out of twenty-two probed that serve content to a plain datacenter fetch at all. Measured 2026-08-18.

What was measured
URL https://mblsportal.sos.state.mn.us/Business/Search
Content assertion Business Filings Online
Arms 6
Rounds per arm 10
Requests 60
Measured 2026-08-18, 15:38–18:09 UTC
Benchmark host DigitalOcean droplet, New York (nyc3)

A request counts as a success only if the expected content is present. An HTTP 200 carrying a challenge page, an empty body or the wrong page is a failure, because it is not a page you can use.

This measures whether a tier works, not long-run stability under sustained load. Ten requests per arm, at a two-second floor, never approach a per-IP rate limit — which is the thing a rotating pool exists to defeat.

Results by arm

Arm Success p50 p95 Bytes per success Outcomes
direct (no proxy) 100% 530 ms 613 ms 48,093 success 10
datacenter, one pinned exit 90% 1,922 ms 14,049 ms 48,093 success 9, error 1
datacenter, rotating exit 100% 1,788 ms 7,766 ms 48,093 success 10
anti-detect, one pinned exit 60% 2,163 ms 16,216 ms 48,093 success 6, server error 4
anti-detect, rotating exit 100% 1,346 ms 1,850 ms 48,093 success 10
residential, rotating exit 70% 7,331 ms 9,863 ms 48,093 success 7, server error 3

What protects this target

Nothing. No 403, no challenge signature and no soft block on any of the 60 requests.

That is a rarer result than it sounds. PROTECTION-CENSUS.md probed twenty-two state business-entity search portals from a clean US datacenter IP and three returned usable content: Alabama, Rhode Island and Minnesota. The other nineteen returned Cloudflare challenges, Imperva stubs, DataDome, reCAPTCHA, CloudFront 403s, empty 202s or nothing at all. If you are building a multi-state registry pipeline, Minnesota is one of the three states where the easy path works.

The arm-level noise on this target is worth reading honestly rather than explaining. The pinned anti-detect arm scored 60% on four HTTP 502s while the rotating anti-detect arm scored 100%; the pinned datacenter arm scored 90% on one transport error while the rotating one scored 100%. At 10 requests per arm those differences are the study's noise floor, not a property of Minnesota, and the 502s are proxy-side.

robots.txt status

The URL measured is allowed by the host's robots.txt.
Status allowed
File https://mblsportal.sos.state.mn.us/robots.txt
Crawl-delay not declared
Fetched as the benchmark's own User-Agent
Note robots.txt 29 bytes via benchmark_ua

Limits of this result

  • The search page was measured, not a submitted query.
  • Ten requests per arm. The spread between 60% and 100% on this target is within noise and should not be read as a session-mode effect.
  • Ten rounds per arm in a single three-hour window on 2026-08-18. Anti-bot behaviour drifts; a result older than a few months is a historical record, not a current one.
  • One exit geography. Every request left from a US datacenter host or a US exit, so nothing here describes how this target answers traffic from elsewhere.
  • The unproxied arm ran from a clean, previously unused cloud IP with no accumulated reputation. It is a best case a production scraper will not sustain.

Run date: 2026-08-18 · Full benchmark report · Harness and raw data · All 32 targets

The 60 rows behind this page are in results/six-arm/raw.csv; filter them with grep '^[^,]*,us_mn_search,' raw.csv.

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