Explained
A rotating proxy is a service-level concept rather than a single proxy: instead of giving you one IP, it gives you access to a pool of IPs and the gateway picks a different one for each request you send (or rotates on a timer). The destination site sees a stream of requests coming from many different IPs, which is the single most effective defense against per-IP rate limits.
Rotating proxy services are most commonly built on top of residential proxies, where the underlying pool consists of hundreds of millions of consumer IPs that the gateway can draw from. Each request looks independent — the gateway terminates one connection, picks a new exit IP, and opens a new connection for the next request — so a target site can't trace your activity to a single source.
The trade-off is session continuity. Anything that requires the same IP across multiple requests (login flows, multi-page checkouts, IP-bound CSRF tokens) breaks under per-request rotation. For those, you'd use sticky sessions, which keep one IP for a defined window before rotating.
How It Works
When you connect to a rotating proxy gateway, you authenticate once and send requests as if to a single endpoint. The gateway maintains a pool of available exit IPs (residential, ISP, or mobile depending on the product). For each incoming request, it selects an IP — at random, round-robin, or based on geo / health filters — and forwards the request out that IP.
The destination site sees N requests coming from N different IPs, even though all of them originate from the same client. The gateway handles all the connection management, IP health checks, and rotation logic, so from the client's perspective it's a single proxy address that 'magically' returns a different source IP on each request.