When people talk about staying anonymous online, the conversation sooner or later turns to proxy IPs. That makes sense, because your IP is one of the first things a website notices. But there's another important thing to consider. It is the "neighborhood" your IP belongs to, created through subnetting.
If a website decides your traffic looks risky, it may not block one address. It may block a whole “neighborhood” (a group of related IP addresses). So if you only rotate IPs inside that same “neighborhood”, you can still look like the same visitor from the website’s point of view.
A website does not see you as a person. It sees requests arriving from somewhere. Each request comes with signals that help the site decide whether to allow it, slow it down, ask for a CAPTCHA, or block it.
Your IP address is the obvious one. But websites also look at context around the IP, because that is where patterns show up.
Here are common things websites check:
Many anti-abuse systems also track IP reputation. It is basically a history-based trust score. If an address, or a whole group of related addresses, has been used for spam or scraping, the site becomes suspicious faster.
That last part is the reason this article exists. The websites create their assessments based on the entire group of people, not just one specific IP address. And that is exactly why the “type” of IP matters, not only the IP itself: traffic that looks like it comes from real home networks often blends in more naturally than datacenter traffic.
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If you have ever wondered how does subnetting work, here is the beginner version. An IP address contains a network part and a device part. The network part is shared by many addresses. The device part changes from one address to another inside the same group.
A quick mental picture helps:
A subnet is simply a block of IP addresses that share the same network prefix. The line between “network” and “device” is defined by a subnet mask. You do not have to calculate it, but it explains why some addresses are treated as one group.
This is why IP subnetting is so common in real networks. It keeps routing predictable, and it makes management easier for the people running the network.
Websites care about repeat patterns. If ten IPs from the same range behave the same way, the site can treat that range as one source. That is why subnetting matters for proxy users. Rotating single addresses may not change the bigger signal.
If you want a few subnetting examples, imagine an office network and a data center. People and servers inside them may use different IPs over time, but the outside world still sees traffic coming from the same few blocks. That is IP subnetting showing up in everyday life.
Blocking one IP is simple, but it is not always effective. Automated traffic usually comes from groups of related addresses, so websites look for broader ways to stop it.
Subnet-level blocking helps because it matches how many proxy pools are built. A provider can hand out hundreds of IPs that sit close together. When abuse appears, the website can stop the whole block at once.
Here is the practical effect. You switch to a “new” proxy IP, but the site still sees the same neighborhood. From its point of view, nothing important changed, and IP subnetting is why it can make that call. In other words, the underlying network layout keeps the connection between those IPs visible.
Reliable anonymous proxies are still useful. They hide your real IP, and they can spread requests across multiple addresses. The catch is that rotation is often happening inside one provider’s network.
So you can rotate a lot and still look related, because of IP subnetting.
Proxies hide your home or office IP from the destination website. They can also help separate sessions if you pair them with clean browser profiles and realistic pacing.
They can also help with location-based access, because the website sees the proxy’s region instead of yours.
None of that is bad. It just does not guarantee a “new network.”
If your proxy list comes from one provider, many IPs may live in the same subnet. From the website’s point of view, it can look like this:
Once the site blocks that range, rotation inside it stops helping. This is the classic failure mode of IP subnetting blind rotation.
You can feel this in real life. You buy a pool, you rotate aggressively, and at first everything works. Then the site starts showing CAPTCHAs, pages load slower, and suddenly the whole pool feels “burned.” In many cases, nothing changed on your side. The site simply connected the dots and decided your traffic source was one related block.
That is why real diversity matters. Avoiding these patterns requires traffic from many different subnets and networks, not just more IPs from the same place.
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Sometimes a new IP is enough. For a simple rate limit, it can work.
But when a website is using stronger rules, changing the network matters more than changing the IP. In practice, you want IPs that spread across different subnets, different providers, or different ASNs.
This is why network subnetting matters in real life: you want your traffic to come from genuinely different networks, not one visible cluster.
It doesn't take a network expert to check a proxy list. You simply need to confirm that the addresses are widely scattered.
A subnetting calculator can help with this. You enter an IP and the prefix, and the tool shows the network block it belongs to. Do that for a sample of your pool, and you will quickly see whether IP subnetting is working for you or against you.
Here is a small checklist that tends to catch most problems:
When you look up a proxy IP, focus on three pieces of data:
If most of your pool shares the same ASN and the same few ranges, the IPs are closely related. Websites notice this pattern fast. Because of IP subnetting, “many IPs” does not automatically mean “many networks” when you are buying proxies.
This matters even more with residential proxies, where not all IPs are what they claim to be. We break this down in detail in Real vs. Fake Residential Proxies: How to Find Quality IPs.
Two proxy sellers can look different on the surface, while reselling the same upstream ranges. The easiest way to spot this is to compare prefixes. If you see repeated blocks, your pools overlap.
A few warning signs are common:
When these show up, rotation can fail even if each individual IP looks fresh. The grouping described by IP subnetting is what the website reacts to, and the network structure is what makes that grouping visible.
Most proxy problems come from simple assumptions.
People buy from one provider because the price is good. They focus only on country tags. Or they forget that shared pools can be “burned” by other users.
And one mistake is especially common. People ignore how IPs are grouped and assume that a bigger list automatically means more diversity. In reality, a provider can sell thousands of IPs that still live inside a few ranges.
Proxy IPs matter, but they are not the whole story. Many websites make decisions at the block level because it is faster and more reliable than chasing single IPs. That is why subnetting deserves the same attention as rotation.
Before you buy proxies, try a trial or the cheapest plan first. Use those IPs to check the provider, ASN, and network ranges. Use a subnetting calculator if you want a quick way to see which addresses sit together. Once you think in terms of IP subnetting, it gets much easier to build proxy pools that look more natural and stay usable longer.