IP Address Lookup

About this ip address lookup

Your public IP address is the unique identifier your home network presents to the internet. Websites you visit see this IP (not your computer's internal address); it is also what services use to estimate your location for content licensing, fraud detection, abuse blocking and analytics. Knowing your own IP is useful for opening firewall rules to a remote server, allowing yourself into a restricted system, troubleshooting connectivity problems with your ISP, confirming a VPN is working, and simply checking what an external site sees when you connect.

There are two address families. IPv4 uses 32 bits, written as four decimal numbers from 0 to 255 separated by dots (203.0.113.42). The total space is about 4.3 billion addresses, which sounded enormous in the 1980s and ran out in the 2010s as smartphones, IoT devices and cloud servers multiplied. IPv6 uses 128 bits, written as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by colons (2001:db8:85a3::8a2e:370:7334), giving an effectively unlimited supply — enough to assign trillions of addresses to every grain of sand on Earth. IPv6 adoption has been creeping upward for two decades; as of the mid-2020s roughly 40–45% of global traffic is IPv6, varying widely by country (India and France are well above average; many African and Eastern European networks are still mostly IPv4).

Public IPs live on the open internet; private IPs only exist inside a local network. RFC 1918 reserves three ranges for private use: 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16. These addresses are never routable on the internet, which is why every home network can use 192.168.1.x without conflict — your router does Network Address Translation (NAT) so all the devices on the inside share the single public IP on the outside. Mobile carriers and increasingly some fixed-line ISPs run Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT), where hundreds of customers share one public IPv4 address. That is why your phone's IP-based location can be entirely wrong, and why some services (gaming, port forwarding, peer-to-peer apps) misbehave on mobile or budget broadband.

IP geolocation is approximate by nature. The lookup uses a free public geolocation database, which maps IP ranges to physical locations based on registration records and ISP-supplied data. Accuracy depends on the database and the connection type: for fixed-line broadband in a major city you can expect 50–100 km of precision (often the location of an ISP routing hub rather than your home), and for mobile networks, satellite links, business connections and rural lines it can be hundreds of kilometres off — or simply land on the country capital because no finer data is available. CDN routing makes things stranger still: if you connect to a service via a CDN edge node, your IP can appear to be in the city where the CDN terminates the connection, not where you actually are.

If you use a VPN, the IP shown is your VPN provider's exit node, not your real IP. The geolocation reflects the VPN exit location, which is exactly the point — VPNs work by tunnelling your traffic to a remote server which then makes the request on your behalf, so the website only ever sees the VPN's IP. This page is one of the simplest ways to confirm a VPN connection is actually working: load it before connecting, note the IP, connect to the VPN, reload, and check the IP has changed. Tor works similarly but uses multiple hops; the exit node IP is what every visited site sees. From an IP alone a website can learn your rough country, region and ISP, but not your name, address or device — those come from cookies, logins, browser fingerprinting and account history, not the IP itself.

How to use it

1. Open the page — the lookup runs automatically as soon as it loads.
2. Read your IP, approximate location, ISP, organisation and timezone.
3. For VPN testing, run the lookup before connecting, then again after — the IP should change and the location should match your chosen VPN exit.
4. For firewall allow-listing, copy the IP exactly as shown and paste it into the remote system.
5. For diagnostics, screenshot the result and include it in any support ticket for your ISP or hosting provider.

Tips & notes

• IPs are not personally identifying by themselves, but combined with a timestamp and a browser fingerprint they can usually identify a specific household. Treat the IP like a phone number, not a name.
• For privacy, a VPN or Tor masks your real IP. Free VPNs typically log activity and sometimes sell it; paid no-log providers (Mullvad, IVPN, ProtonVPN) have published audits and clearer privacy policies.
• Mobile networks (4G, 5G) often share a single IP across many users via CGNAT — the geolocation can be hundreds of kilometres off and your apparent location can jump between requests.
• Private IPs (10.x, 172.16–31.x, 192.168.x) are local to your network and never appear here. To see your private IP, look in your router's admin page or your operating system's network settings.
• For IPv6, the prefix (first 64 bits) identifies your network and is fairly stable; the suffix can change with privacy extensions to make tracking harder. Both halves still go to the same household most of the time.
• If your IP changes every few days, you are on a dynamic-IP plan (typical for home ISPs). For a static IP — needed for self-hosting, port forwarding or VPN endpoints — most ISPs offer it on business plans for a small surcharge.

Frequently asked questions