ASN | ScrapeRouter

ASN stands for Autonomous System Number: an identifier for a network operated by an ISP, cloud provider, or large organization on the internet. In scraping, ASN matters because many sites score traffic by network identity, not just by IP, so requests from a known data center ASN often get challenged faster than traffic from residential or ISP ASNs.

Examples

A target may block traffic from AWS or OVH even if you rotate IPs, because the new IPs still belong to the same data center ASN.

curl https://ipinfo.io/8.8.8.8

Example response:

{
  "ip": "8.8.8.8",
  "org": "AS15169 Google LLC"
}

In practice, that AS15169 part is the ASN. If a site has rules against that network, changing to another Google IP does not really change the story.

With a scraping API, ASN choice is often bundled into the proxy pool. For example, if you need traffic that does not come from obvious cloud ASNs:

import requests

url = "https://www.scraperouter.com/api/v1/scrape/"
headers = {
    "Authorization": "Api-Key $api_key",
    "Content-Type": "application/json"
}
payload = {
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "country": "us"
}

resp = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload)
print(resp.status_code)
print(resp.text)

Practical tips

If a site works in local testing but falls apart at scale, check the ASN mix of your proxy pool. A lot of "random blocking" is just the target disliking your network source.
Rotating IPs inside the same bad ASN often does almost nothing.
Treat ASN as one signal, not the only one: targets also look at request patterns, TLS fingerprint, session behavior, cookies, and plain old rate abuse.
For hard targets, separate your pools by network type: residential, ISP, mobile, data center.
Log ASN alongside response status, challenge rate, and success rate. Otherwise you're guessing.
If one ASN starts getting burned, route around it instead of retrying the same thing harder.
You do not need to obsess over ASN for every project. For easy targets, standard data center IPs are cheaper and completely fine.

Use cases

Proxy debugging: you are getting CAPTCHAs on one provider but not another, and the main difference is the ASN reputation.
Pool selection: choosing residential or ISP-backed traffic for targets that are aggressive against cloud networks.
Block analysis: figuring out why a scraper gets clean 200s in low volume, then starts returning 403s once the target notices repeated requests from the same network family.
Cost control: using cheaper data center ASNs where they work, and saving residential traffic for the targets that actually require it.
Routing logic: sending difficult domains through a different proxy class or provider when a specific ASN gets degraded.