What is ASN (Autonomous System Number)?
A unique identifier for a network operator on the internet. Targeting by ASN lets you select IPs belonging to a specific ISP or carrier.
An autonomous system is a block of IP addresses under one operator's routing control, and its ASN is the number that identifies it globally. Every IP address maps to exactly one, which is how anyone can look up whether an address belongs to a consumer provider, a mobile carrier or a hosting company.
This lookup is the backbone of proxy detection. A site does not need to guess whether traffic is coming from a data centre — it checks the ASN against a list of known hosting operators. That is precisely why datacenter proxies are easy to filter and ISP proxies are not.
For collection work, ASN targeting lets you match a specific carrier when the data depends on it: mobile network testing, ISP-specific ad delivery, or verifying what subscribers of one provider actually see.
Related terms
Geo-Targeting
Selecting proxy IPs from a specific country, state, city or ASN to collect location-accurate data or access region-restricted content.
ISP Proxy
A static proxy hosted in a data center but registered under a residential ISP, combining datacenter speed with residential trust and a zero fraud score. Also called a static residential proxy.
Fraud Score
A risk rating (0–100) that anti-fraud systems assign to an IP. Lower is better; seamless ISP proxies carry a zero fraud score, so they are rarely flagged.
Datacenter Proxy
A proxy hosted on cloud or server infrastructure rather than an ISP. It is the fastest and cheapest proxy type but the easiest for sites to detect.