Glossary · Detection & reputation
IP reputation
The accumulated trust score a site or third-party service assigns to an IP address based on its network, history and behaviour.
IP reputation is the standing an address carries before you send a single request. Reputation services and the sites that buy from them track what each address is, which network owns it, whether it is residential or hosted, and what it has done, spam, fraud, abuse, past blocks, and distil that into a score that gates how the address is treated.
This is why the address you route through matters more than anything you do with it. A residential IP starts trusted because its network and history are benign; a datacenter IP on an abused subnet starts suspect no matter how politely you behave. The score precedes the request.
Reputation is also why rotation has limits and why sharing is risky. New addresses in a bad network inherit the network's score, and a shared address inherits its co-tenants' behaviour, so a clean reputation is something you buy and protect rather than something you can simply reset.
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