TL;DR: Smart Rotation is IPLoop's AI-powered layer for choosing, holding, and switching residential IPs. Instead of rotating on a fixed timer, it watches how each target responds and decides per request whether to keep the current IP, rotate within the same city or ISP, or escalate to the Web Unblocker. It is on by default for every plan.

Why fixed rotation breaks

Most proxy setups rotate IPs on a schedule: every request, every N minutes, or when a connection drops. That works until it doesn't. Rotate too often and you lose sessions, carts, and logins. Rotate too rarely and a single blocked IP poisons a whole batch of requests.

The right answer depends on the target. A search engine tolerates a fresh IP per query. An e-commerce checkout needs the same IP for ten minutes. A social platform wants an IP that looks like one person in one city for an hour.

What Smart Rotation does

Smart Rotation sits between your request and the 175M+ IPs in the IPLoop network and makes three decisions:

• Hold or switch. It reads response codes, latency, and challenge pages to decide whether the current IP is still healthy for this target.

• Where to rotate. When it does switch, it stays inside your targeting constraints — country, city, ISP, or ASN — so a sticky session in Berlin stays in Berlin.

• When to escalate. If a target keeps blocking clean residential IPs, the request is handed to the AI-powered Web Unblocker for JavaScript rendering and CAPTCHA handling.

You still control the basics. Rotating sessions give you a new IP per request; sticky sessions pin an IP for the session lifetime you choose. Smart Rotation handles everything in between.

Using it

Nothing to install. Every proxy endpoint on proxy.iploop.io:8880 uses Smart Rotation by default. Pick the session mode in your username string as documented in the Sessions guide, or manage it through chat with the ProxyClaw MCP server.

curl -x http://USER-country-de-session-abc123:PASS@proxy.iploop.io:8880 https://httpbin.org/ip

curl -x http://USER-country-de-session-abc123:PASS@proxy.iploop.io:8880 https://httpbin.org/ip

What's next

We are extending the same decision layer to the Scraping API so structured-data requests benefit from per-target learning, and adding rotation analytics to the dashboard so you can see why an IP was switched.

Questions or edge cases? Write to support@iploop.io or open an issue on GitHub.