IP rotation is the practice of cycling through a pool of IP addresses during web requests to avoid detection and rate limiting. Rotation can happen on every request, on a time interval, or when a block is detected by monitoring response codes.
Effective IP rotation strategies match the target site's behavior: aggressive rotation on large anonymous scrapes, sticky sessions where the site expects consistent IPs (logged-in accounts, shopping carts), and geographic targeting when content differs by region. Poor rotation — using too few IPs or too-predictable patterns — is one of the top causes of scrape failures at scale.