IP reputation

IP reputation is a score that anti-fraud and anti-bot services attach to an IP address, based on who operates the address and what behavior they have previously seen from it. Sites buy that score from third parties or build their own, and it is consulted before your first request is answered.

What feeds the score

• Who owns the address — the ASN tells the scorer whether it is a mobile carrier, a home ISP, or a hosting company.
• Blocklist history — appearances on public spam and abuse lists.
• Observed behavior — request rate, failed logins, and how many separate accounts have signed in from the same address.
• The neighborhood — how the surrounding range has behaved, which is how a subnet ban starts.

Why it matters when you buy proxies

You inherit whatever the previous user of an address left behind. On a shared pool that history is unknown and unfixable — you cannot appeal a score you did not earn. On a dedicated IP the only behavior attached to the address while you hold it is yours, which is the whole argument for paying more for one.

A concrete example

Two customers buy proxies on the same day. One gets an address from a shared pool that a scraper hammered last week and sees challenges on every page. The other gets an address nobody else is using and sees none — same tool, same target, different history on the IP.