# IP reputation

IP reputation is the assessment a website or a security vendor makes of an IP address from what is known about it: who announces it (consumer ISP, carrier, hosting company), whether it appears on abuse blocklists, whether it has recently produced attacks, spam or bot traffic, and how many distinct users it seems to represent. Requests from a low-reputation address get challenges, degraded content or blocks; residential and mobile addresses start with a higher reputation than hosting ranges.


## What feeds the score

- The autonomous system: hosting ranges are penalised by default, consumer ISPs and carriers are not.
- Blocklist presence: DNSBLs, threat-intelligence feeds, proxy and VPN detection lists.
- Recent behaviour on the scoring vendor's own network of customers: rate, failed logins, CAPTCHA outcomes.
- Diversity: an address that produces one browser fingerprint at machine speed is not a household.


## Reputation and proxy type

| Proxy type | Starting reputation | Why |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mobile | Highest | CGNAT: thousands of real subscribers per address |
| Residential | High | Consumer ISP, real household behaviour |
| ISP | High, static | Registered to a consumer ISP; only your history on it |
| Datacenter | Low on protected sites | Hosting ASN, fingerprinted as automation |


## Protecting it

On dedicated addresses the reputation is yours to keep: reasonable rates, consistent locales, no failed-login storms. On pools it is the provider's job to retire tainted exits and to keep abusers out, which is what an enforced acceptable use policy is for.


## How it works at ProxShift

ProxShift checks datacenter ranges against blocklists before they enter an order, replaces dedicated addresses that stop working, and enforces the acceptable use policy on every network so that pool reputation stays high for everyone.

Source: https://proxshift.com/glossary/ip-reputation