How does VPN detection improve real-time bidding efficiency?

By flagging anonymized traffic before the bid is placed,VPN detectionhelps avoid wasted impressions, improves audience targeting, and reduces false engagement, saving both budget and analytics integrity.

How do VPNs and proxies degrade geo-targeting accuracy in programmatic advertising?

VPNs and proxies can mask a user's true location, leading to mismatched geos and irrelevant ad delivery. This skews targeting and complicates attribution unless filtered out or flagged early in the funnel.

Solutions for improving attribution models when VPNs disrupt the user journey path.

UsingIPinfo CoreorIPinfo Plusgives you privacy flags (e.g., is_vpn, is_proxy, is_tor) to detect anonymized traffic. This allows you to separate unreliable traffic paths from your attribution models.

How to differentiate between a legitimate user using a corporate VPN and a fraudulent proxy network?

IPinfo Plusincludes provider-level identifiers (e.g., NordVPN vs. ZScaler) to help distinguish consumer privacy tools from enterprise tunnels so you can block risk without harming legitimate usage.

What are the risks of regulatory penalties for serving prohibited content or ads to a VPN user in a restricted location?

Serving regulated or geo-sensitive content to VPN-masked users can result in compliance issues. Using IPinfo'sprivacy detectionsignals helps ad platforms manage these risks more proactively.

How can VPN detection reduce impression fraud and click fraud originating from anonymized IP ranges?

Anonymized IPs often correlate with bot activity, ad stacking, or arbitrage abuse. Identifying VPNs, proxies, and hosting infrastructure at the IP level gives you cleaner input data for fraud models and real-time exclusion logic.

Detect VPN Traffic for Better Ad Targeting

Detect VPN Traffic Before It Enters Your Ad Funnel

Stop bidding on traffic that is intentionally masked or fraudulent. Incorporate privacy detection into your process to make every advertising bid smarter and more effective.

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{
  ip:"1.0.0.232",
  asn:"AS13335",
  as_name:"Cloudflare, Inc.",
  as_domain:"cloudflare.com",
  country_code:"AU",
  country:"Australia",
  continent_code:"OC",
  continent:"Oceania"
}

Full IPv4 and IPv6 Coverage

IPinfo helps you detect anonymized traffic across both IPv4 and the full allocated IPv6 space. As more traffic routes through mobile, CTV, and VPNs, you'll stay ahead of location spoofing and impression fraud.

Privacy Detection via API or Database

Access anonymization flags in real time through our low-latency API, or enrich large-scale impression logs with downloadable datasets. Identify VPNs, proxies, Tor nodes, and hosting infrastructure programmatically.

Fast to Integrate, Built to Handle Volume

Set up takes minutes with developer-ready SDKs and clean JSON output. Whether you're filtering real-time bids or optimizing historical spend, IPinfo scales with your adtech stack.

How Marketers Can Leverage Privacy Detection Tools for Better Ad Targeting

IPinfo Lite gives you reliable country and ASN data to flag geographic mismatches, which is perfect for refining geo-targeting logic. Upgrade to IPinfo Core or IPinfo Plus to unlock privacy detection, enabling smarter decisions about anonymized or suspicious traffic before bids are placed.

Sample Response

$ curl https://ipinfo.io/23.64.48.164?token=$TOKEN

{
  ip:"23.64.48.164",
  hostname:"a23-64-48-164.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com",
  city:"Ashburn",
  region:"Virginia",
  country:"US",
  loc:"39.0437,-77.4875",
  org:"AS20940 Akamai International B.V.",
  postal:"20147",
  timezone:"America/New_York",
  asn:{
    asn:"AS20940",
    name:"Akamai International B.V.",
    domain:"akamai.com",
    route:"23.64.48.0/20",
    type:"hosting"
  },
  company:{
    name:"Akamai Technologies, Inc.",
    domain:"akamai.com",
    type:"hosting"
  },
  privacy:{
    vpn:false,
    proxy:false,
    tor:false,
    relay:false,
    hosting:true,
    service:""
  },
  abuse:{
    address:"US, MA, Cambridge, 145 Broadway",
    country:"US",
    email:"abuse@akamai.com",
    name:"Akamai Technologies",
    network:"23.64.0.0/14",
    phone:"+1-617-444-3000"
  }
}

Dev Notes

Going to be developing with our data? Here's the main things you may want to know:

One-line setup via curl, fetch, or SDK
Multi-language SDKs (Node.js, Python, Go, PHP, Java...)
Real-time JSON, ~100ms average latency
Optional integrations (API, DBs, Snowflake, GCP, Splunk)
Trusted by Microsoft, WordPress, and 1000s of dev team
Fresh, reliable data with 99.99% uptime, updated daily

See our full documentation

Why Use IPinfo Lite for Pre-Bid Filtering and Privacy Detection

IPinfo Lite is your starting point for integrating IP data into pre-bid workflows. With accurate country and ASN information, it helps identify country-level IP geolocation and ASN context, all without cookies.

When privacy signals matter, IPinfo Core and IPinfo Plus offer deeper insights. You'll get more information about VPN, proxy, Tor, and hosting infrastructure, along with mobile detection and network classifications to help separate real users from anonymized noise.

Easy-to-integrate API and database formats

Unlimited lookups and commercial use rights

Seamless upgrade path to full privacy detection and carrier context

IpInfo Lite

Want to try out our data for free? Start with IPinfo Lite

Get started

No monthly fees, no credit card required, and unlimited API requests.

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Trusted by AdTech Teams That Value Accuracy

We use IPinfo to enrich our data with geolocation information, which helps us provide a better user experience. We also use it to detect and block fraudulent activities.
Mohamad Ali BaydounChief Technology Officer at Lemonade Fashion

The implementation is very easy and straightforward. The API is very concrete - features are highlighted and that’s it, nothing too fancy. I remember checking out some other services but none of them were easy to use or attractive from the economical point of view.
Lluís Garceso Espigares

IPinfo is absolutely essential to our business. The data is rock solid, the API is dead simple, and the price is unbeatable. I constantly recommend it to all of my friends in the industry.
Andrew MorrisFounder & Chief Architect at Greynoise

We use IPinfo to enrich our data with geolocation information, which helps us provide a better user experience. We also use it to detect and block fraudulent activities.
Mohamad Ali BaydounChief Technology Officer at Lemonade Fashion

The implementation is very easy and straightforward. The API is very concrete - features are highlighted and that’s it, nothing too fancy. I remember checking out some other services but none of them were easy to use or attractive from the economical point of view.
Lluís Garceso Espigares

Frequently Asked Questions

By flagging anonymized traffic before the bid is placed, VPN detection helps avoid wasted impressions, improves audience targeting, and reduces false engagement, saving both budget and analytics integrity.
VPNs and proxies can mask a user's true location, leading to mismatched geos and irrelevant ad delivery. This skews targeting and complicates attribution unless filtered out or flagged early in the funnel.
Using IPinfo Core or IPinfo Plus gives you privacy flags (e.g., is_vpn, is_proxy, is_tor) to detect anonymized traffic. This allows you to separate unreliable traffic paths from your attribution models.
IPinfo Plus includes provider-level identifiers (e.g., NordVPN vs. ZScaler) to help distinguish consumer privacy tools from enterprise tunnels so you can block risk without harming legitimate usage.
Serving regulated or geo-sensitive content to VPN-masked users can result in compliance issues. Using IPinfo's privacy detection signals helps ad platforms manage these risks more proactively.
Anonymized IPs often correlate with bot activity, ad stacking, or arbitrage abuse. Identifying VPNs, proxies, and hosting infrastructure at the IP level gives you cleaner input data for fraud models and real-time exclusion logic.