ASN targeting

Definition

ASN targeting is a proxy-routing feature that lets you select exits announced by a specific Autonomous System Number — typically to match a target website's expectation about which ISP its visitors use. In practice: rather than routing through "any US residential IP," you route through "a Comcast (AS7922) residential IP" or "an AT&T (AS7018) residential IP."

Why it matters for AI workloads

Most AI data collection workloads don't need ASN targeting. The default residential pool rotates across the carriers that cover the country, which is sufficient for regional content that geoblocks cloud but doesn't care which residential ASN the request comes from.

ASN targeting matters in three specific cases:

1. Carrier-specific content or services. Some US regional content portals serve differently to Comcast vs. Spectrum subscribers (because of regional content deals). A corpus that wants to capture "Spectrum-visible content" specifically needs ASN targeting.

2. Training-data diversity by carrier. For a training corpus that documents per-ASN sampling, ASN targeting allows balanced representation rather than whatever the default pool distribution happens to be.

3. Troubleshooting target-specific blocks. When a target website blocks a specific ASN aggressively (often one with a known bot-traffic problem), routing around that ASN to a different residential carrier is the fix.

How it works at SquadProxy

Pass X-Squad-ASN: AS7922 (example) to route through Comcast. The US country page documents which ASNs we scale against per country. The residential proxy page covers the broader class.

Related

• US country ASN breakdown
• Residential proxy class
• Rotating proxy glossary entry
• Residential vs datacenter for AI