An ASN (Autonomous System Number) is the unique number identifying a network on the internet — assigned to ISPs, cloud providers, and large organizations — that sites use to look up who owns an IP address and judge its trustworthiness almost instantly, independent of the IP's geography or history.
Every IP address belongs to a network announced under an ASN via BGP (the protocol that routes traffic across the internet), and that ownership is public and queryable — WHOIS records, IP-intelligence databases, and free lookup APIs resolve any IP to its ASN and owning organization in milliseconds. A site's anti-bot layer runs this lookup before evaluating anything else about a request, because it's cheap and highly informative on its own.
The check that matters most is category: an ASN belonging to AWS, Google Cloud, Hetzner, or OVH signals hosting infrastructure, which ordinary human visitors essentially never browse from directly. An ASN belonging to Comcast, Vodafone, or a national ISP signals a consumer connection. That single lookup is why datacenter and residential IPs get treated so differently before a single header or fingerprint is even checked.
Category is the first filter, but not the only one — individual ASNs accumulate their own reputation based on the traffic history sites observe from them. A residential ISP's ASN can still get flagged if a large share of its traffic has historically come from bots or abuse, and some datacenter ASNs are treated more leniently than others because their customer base skews toward legitimate automation (monitoring services, CDNs) rather than scraping.
That's why proxy quality isn't just "residential good, datacenter bad" — a reputable provider actively manages which ASNs its IP pool draws from, retiring ranges that accumulate a poor reputation, since the ASN-level signal persists independent of which specific IP within it you're assigned.
import requests
info = requests.get("https://ipinfo.io/8.8.8.8/json", timeout=10).json()
print(info.get("org")) # e.g. "AS15169 Google LLC" — the ASN and owning orgHow Crawlora handles this
Crawlora actively manages ASN reputation across its proxy pools — retiring ranges that accumulate abuse history and matching requests to a network type appropriate for the target — rather than leaving ASN selection to chance the way an unmanaged proxy list does.
Related reading
Glossary
FAQ
Free lookup services like ipinfo.io or a WHOIS query return the owning ASN and organization for any IP address in seconds — useful both for auditing your own proxy pool and for understanding why a particular IP might be getting flagged.
Usually more trusted than a datacenter ASN by default, but not automatically — individual residential ASNs can still accumulate poor reputation from historical abuse, and anti-bot systems weight that history alongside the basic type classification.
Not every site checks ASN, and among those that do, thresholds vary — some datacenter ASNs with legitimate mixed traffic (monitoring tools, CDNs) get treated more leniently than known scraping-heavy hosting ranges. It's a per-ASN reputation, not a single binary rule.
Beyond ASN (Autonomous System Number), Crawlora's own docs cover the rest of the stack — browse the APIs, test a request in Playground, and move from scraping infrastructure work to production data workflows.