ASN targeting: what an ASN is, and when to choose the network behind your proxy

Every address on the internet is announced by a network with a number of its own, its autonomous system number (ASN): Comcast’s home network, AT&T’s, a mobile carrier’s, a hosting company’s. ASN targeting asks the provider for a proxy address from one of those networks, so a site sees a visitor from, say, Comcast rather than just “the United States”. Fewer providers sell it than sell country or city targeting, some charge more for it or keep it for larger plans, and a narrow network gives you a smaller pool. Use it when the network itself matters to your job.

Answer · The live comparison uses prices checked up to Oct 24, 2026; every figure in the text keeps the date it was checked.

What an ASN is

The American registry for internet numbers, ARIN, defines it: “An Autonomous System (AS) is a group of one or more IP prefixes (lists of IP addresses accessible on a network) run by one or more network operators that maintain a single, clearly-defined routing policy. Network operators need Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) to control routing within their networks and to exchange routing information with other Internet Service Providers (ISPs)” (ARIN).

In practice an ASN names the network an address belongs to. Comcast’s cable network is AS7922 and AT&T’s is AS7018 (Hurricane Electric’s BGP toolkit, which lists the address blocks each one announces). A large company can run several.

Why the network matters to a site

Sites look at the network because it says what kind of connection a visitor is on. Lists of proxy and hosting addresses are built on it (proxy IP reputation): an address announced by a hosting company is a server, one announced by a home internet provider looks like a household. That is the whole difference between a datacenter and a residential proxy (residential vs datacenter proxies).

Country or city targeting picks where an address is. ASN targeting picks whose network it is on, and some jobs need exactly that:

• Checking what one network’s customers see. An advert, a price or a page that is served differently to one internet provider’s or one mobile carrier’s subscribers can only be checked from an address on that network.
• Testing your own site or app. How a page loads for people on one provider’s lines depends on that provider’s network.
• Matching a mobile carrier. Mobile proxies are often sold by carrier for the same reason (mobile vs residential proxies).

For most scraping, a country or city is enough, and a narrow network only makes the pool smaller.

How you ask for it

On rotating plans the network is usually chosen in the proxy’s username. Bright Data’s documentation gives the form -asn-xxxxx, for example brd-customer-<customer_id>-zone-<zone_name>-asn-56386, and notes that its “Datacenter and ISP proxies only support country targeting” (Bright Data). Other providers use similar flags; each one’s documentation gives its own spelling.

To check that the address you got is on the network you asked for, ask an address lookup service through the proxy:

curl -x http://USER:PASS@HOST:PORT https://ipinfo.io/org

It prints the network of the address the site sees, such as AS7922 Comcast Cable Communications, LLC. Run it a few times on a rotating plan: each new address should show the same network.

What it costs

The box at the top of this page counts, from today’s records, how many of the providers we track list ASN or network targeting and which publish a surcharge for it. What city and ASN targeting costs prices the same traffic with and without location targeting on the same providers.

Two things the price list does not show. A single network holds a small part of any pool, so the addresses you can reach drop sharply, and a request for a network with no address free at that moment fails. And access is tightening: Proxyway’s 2026 market research reports that after the botnet cases of 2025 and 2026 “some vendors have started requiring a KYC procedure to access ASN targeting, or that they’ve removed this feature altogether” (proxies you can buy without an ID check).