Announcing General Availability: Twilio Lookup’s Line Type Intelligence is now live

Announcing General Availability: Twilio Lookup Line Type Intelligence is now live

Today, we’re excited to announce that Twilio Lookup Line Type Intelligence is now generally available! With this release, product leaders and developers can easily build data-driven communication flows that leverage mobile-based signals and adapt to the unique attributes of every phone number, all at global scale.

Identifying the line type of a phone number is more than a nice-to-have, it’s key to delivering relevant and engaging communications. When you know whether a number is mobile, landline, VoIP, or toll-free (and more) you can fine-tune message routing, reduce fraud, and boost conversions. This kind of insight helps your business connect with users the right way, every time.

What is Lookup Line Type Intelligence?

Lookup Line Type Intelligence lets you instantly identify what type of phone line any phone number belongs to. Is it a mobile phone? A fixed landline? Fixed or non-fixed VoIP? toll-free, or something else?

This intelligence gives you granular insight, so you can tailor communication strategies for better deliverability, and user experience. For example, send SMS only to mobile phone numbers, prioritize voice calls to landlines, or flag risky VoIP numbers in real time.

The challenge of incompatible numbers

One persistent challenge for businesses is that large phone number databases often contain numbers unable to receive SMS. Twilio’s own analysis reveals that 13.7% of numbers submitted for SMS actually don’t support it, commonly because they’re landlines or unsupported types. By using Line Type Intelligence, you can reliably filter out these incompatible numbers before sending messages. This helps you streamline your SMS campaigns, improve conversion rates, and significantly reduce unnecessary messaging costs.

Global Coverage 

Line Type Intelligence is available for phone numbers worldwide. Businesses operating across borders can leverage the same powerful insights, no matter where their users are. This worldwide reach ensures product leaders and developers can build with confidence,for every market.

How to get started with Line Type Intelligence

Getting started is simple:

1. Sign up for Twilio. If you haven’t already, create a Twilio account.

2. Gather your credentials. You’ll need your Twilio Account SID and Auth Token, found in the Twilio Console. These will authenticate your API requests.

3. Make your first API request. Here’s how you can get a phone number’s line type using cURL:

Replace {PhoneNumber} with the full number you want to look up (including country code). The response will include fields that specify the line type, such as mobile, landline, non_fixed_voip, and many more.

Dive deeper with our Lookup API documentation.

Core use cases

Line Type Intelligence opens up powerful new possibilities for your business:

Fraud prevention: Identify non-fixed VoIP phone numbers, which are often linked to fraudulent activity, to add an extra layer of security before engaging with new users.

Deliverability: Boost deliverability by reaching your audience on the right type of phone number, and personalize your outreach based on device type for higher engagement.

Better together: Twilio Verify and Line Type Intelligence

Pairing Twilio Verify with Lookup’s Line Type Intelligence enables seamless, secure verification experiences while reducing friction and costs. Here’s how these two products work together:

User Verification: Line Type Intelligence instantly distinguishes between mobile, landline, VoIP, and toll-free numbers, so you can ensure OTPs and verification codes are only sent to devices that support SMS. This is essential for onboarding and authentication flows, where failed OTP deliveries can lead to user frustration, wasted messages and increased support needs. For example, Reddit integrated Line Type Intelligence into their user authentication flow to check number types in real time. This allowed them to avoid sending OTPs to numbers that couldn’t receive them, leading to significant cost savings.

Fraud Reduction: Identify risky or non-fixed VoIP numbers that are often used for fraudulent signups. You can flag these numbers or route them for extra verification steps within your authentication flow.

When you combine Verify with Line Type Intelligence, you’re not just sending codes, you’re sending them to the right users at the right time, over the right channels. This combination improves the efficiency and security of your onboarding and authentication strategies, helping you drive conversion while protecting your users.

Get started today

Ready to build more intelligent communication flows?

• Start with the Lookup API docs

• Do more with Lookup: check out our other data packages to determine Caller Name, detect SIM Swaps, and more

• How to filter VoIP out before sending an OTP.

Try Lookup Line Type Intelligence in your workflow today.