36 proxy and web-automation terms in plain English, from ASN to WebRTC leaks, with what each one means for your setup.
An old way of grading proxies by what they reveal. A transparent proxy forwards your real IP in headers such as X-Forwarded-For; an anonymous proxy hides your IP but announces that a proxy is in use (for example with a Via header); an elite proxy sends neither.
In practice: Commercial ISP, residential and mobile proxies add no identifying headers. You can confirm what a site receives with our What Is My IP tool.
A browser that keeps many separate profiles, each with its own cookies, storage and browser fingerprint, and usually its own proxy. Teams use them to keep accounts separated on one computer.
In practice: Each profile should get its own static IP or sticky session, in the location the account normally uses.
The number that identifies a network on the internet, such as a home ISP, a mobile carrier or a hosting provider. Every IP address is announced by an ASN, and websites look it up to tell residential, mobile and datacenter traffic apart.
In practice: ISP proxies are valued because their IPs are announced under consumer ISP ASNs rather than hosting ones.
A single proxy endpoint that forwards each connection through an IP chosen from a pool. You always connect to the same host and port, and the gateway decides the exit IP based on your rotation, session and location settings.
In practice: Rotating residential and mobile proxies are delivered this way, so the exit IP differs from the gateway address.
Billing by the data you transfer (per GB) instead of per IP. It is common for rotating residential and mobile proxies, where you draw from a large pool rather than holding specific IPs.
In practice: Blocking images and media and caching static pages lowers usage. CleanProxies residential and mobile GB never expire; ISP proxies are priced per IP with unlimited bandwidth.
Identifying a browser from many small details: user agent, screen size, fonts, time zone, language, graphics and audio characteristics and more. A fingerprint can link sessions even when cookies are cleared or the IP changes.
In practice: Changing your IP does not change your fingerprint; keep the two consistent with each other and with the account's history.
A challenge a site shows when it is not sure a visitor is human, from picking images to an invisible score. Sites show more of them to IPs with poor reputation and to traffic that moves too fast.
In practice: Treat a CAPTCHA as a signal to slow down and review your setup, not just as an obstacle to solve.
A technique where an ISP or mobile carrier puts many customers behind one shared public IP address. It is standard on mobile networks and increasingly common on home broadband.
In practice: Because many real users share each mobile IP, sites are cautious about blocking them, which is why mobile proxies are hard to block.
How many connections or requests you run at the same time. Higher concurrency finishes jobs faster but concentrates traffic, which can trip rate limits on the target site.
In practice: Spread concurrency across many IPs and keep it low per IP and per target site.
A proxy whose IP belongs to a hosting or cloud provider. Datacenter IPs are fast and cheap, but websites can tell from the ASN that they are not consumer connections, so strict sites block them more often.
A proxy IP assigned to one customer only. Nobody else's traffic affects its reputation, which matters for accounts and long-running sessions.
In practice: CleanProxies ISP proxies and ISP subnets are dedicated: the IPs are yours for as long as you hold them.
When your device resolves domain names through your own network's DNS servers instead of through the proxy, revealing which sites you visit to your ISP and sometimes your real location to observers.
In practice: With SOCKS5, use remote DNS (often written socks5h://) so the proxy resolves hostnames. HTTP proxies resolve the destination on the proxy side automatically.
The IP address your traffic leaves the proxy network from, which is the address websites see. For a static proxy it is usually the proxy's own address; for a gateway it is the pool IP chosen for that request or session.
A proxy that sits in front of clients and makes requests to the internet on their behalf. Everything sold as a proxy service (ISP, residential, mobile) is a forward proxy.
Choosing the country, state or city your exit IP comes from, so websites show you the prices, results and content local users see.
In practice: Match the browser's language and time zone to the target location as well; mismatches are easy for sites to spot.
A real browser engine run without a visible window and controlled by code (for example with Playwright or Puppeteer). It renders JavaScript-heavy pages that plain HTTP requests cannot.
In practice: Headless browsers use far more bandwidth than HTTP requests; block media you don't need.
A proxy that speaks HTTP. For plain http:// sites it forwards the request itself; for https:// sites it opens a tunnel with the CONNECT method and passes the encrypted traffic through unchanged.
CONNECT asks an HTTP proxy to open a raw TCP tunnel to a host and port. Your client then does TLS end-to-end with the website through the tunnel, so the proxy cannot read the encrypted content.
Authenticating to a proxy by the IP you connect from instead of a username and password. The provider lets traffic through only from addresses you have registered.
In practice: Convenient for servers with fixed IPs; use username and password authentication when your own IP changes.
A score or history attached to an IP by anti-fraud and anti-spam services, based on past abuse, the network type and how the IP has been used. Low-reputation IPs see more CAPTCHAs and blocks.
A static IP registered to a consumer internet provider but hosted on fast server infrastructure. It combines the trust of a residential ASN with datacenter speed and stays the same for as long as you hold it.
A proxy whose exit IPs belong to mobile carriers' 4G/5G networks. Because carriers share each IP among many subscribers, mobile IPs carry high trust with social and app platforms.
How a proxy knows you are a customer: a username and password sent with each connection, or IP allowlisting. Gateway proxies often encode options such as country or session ID in the username.
A server that relays your traffic to websites, so they see the proxy's IP address instead of yours. Proxies are used to choose a location, spread requests across many IPs or keep a stable identity per account.
A site's cap on how many requests it accepts from one IP, account or session in a period of time. Exceeding it brings HTTP 429 responses, CAPTCHAs or temporary blocks.
In practice: Honour Retry-After headers, add delays and spread load across IPs instead of retrying immediately.
A proxy that routes through IPs assigned to home internet connections. Sites see ordinary household traffic, which makes residential IPs hard to block and good for public data collection.
Rotating residential proxiesISP vs residential vs datacenter proxies
A proxy in front of web servers rather than clients, such as nginx or a CDN. It receives visitors' requests and passes them to the site, adding caching, load balancing and protection. It is not what proxy providers sell.
A proxy service that changes your exit IP automatically, on every request or after a set time, by drawing from a pool. Rotation spreads traffic so no single IP carries much of it.
A proxy IP used by several customers at once. Cheaper, but other users' behaviour affects the IP's reputation and can get it blocked on the sites you need.
A general-purpose proxy protocol that relays any TCP connection, and UDP where supported, without understanding HTTP. Clients and tools that aren't web browsers often prefer it.
In practice: CleanProxies proxies support SOCKS5 alongside HTTP(S); ISP proxies also support UDP for compatible applications.
Keeping the same exit IP on a rotating proxy for a period of time, usually by adding a session ID to the username. Use it for logins, carts and multi-page flows that must stay on one IP.
In practice: CleanProxies residential sticky sessions last up to 90 minutes.
A contiguous block of IP addresses. A /24 holds 256 addresses that share the first three numbers, such as 203.0.113.0 to 203.0.113.255. Sites sometimes rate-limit or block whole subnets at once.
In practice: Owning a whole subnet means no neighbours on the block can hurt its reputation.
A connectionless internet protocol used by voice, video calls, games, DNS and QUIC. Most HTTP proxies only carry TCP; UDP needs a SOCKS5 proxy that supports UDP ASSOCIATE.
The header that names your browser, its version and operating system. Sites compare it with other signals; an outdated or inconsistent user agent is a common reason for blocks.
Collecting data from web pages automatically. Responsible scraping reads public data, respects rate limits and terms, and uses official APIs where they exist.
WebRTC, the browser technology behind video calls, can reveal your real IP address to a website even when your browser uses a proxy, because it gathers network addresses outside the proxy connection.
In practice: Anti-detect browsers and browser settings can disable or mask WebRTC; test after setting up a new profile.
