A rotating proxy automatically assigns a new IP address from a pool for each request — or at set time intervals — making large-scale web requests appear to come from many different sources. This prevents target sites from blocking a single IP address after detecting too many requests.
Rotating proxies are fundamental to web scraping at scale. Most residential proxy providers enable rotation by default. The size and quality of the rotation pool — number of IPs, geographic spread, freshness — determines how long you can scrape a target before encountering blocks or CAPTCHAs. Some use cases require sticky sessions instead of pure rotation.