IP Address Detector — Your Public IP, Provider and Location

This Is Not Your Computer's Address

The address shown above belongs to the point where your network meets the internet — usually your router, sometimes a piece of equipment further upstream at your provider. Your laptop, phone and television all appear as this same address to every site they visit.

Inside your home network each device has its own private address, typically beginning 192.168, 10., or 172.16 through 172.31. Those ranges are reserved and are not routable across the internet, so countless networks worldwide use the identical numbers without conflict. Your router translates between the private addresses inside and the single public one outside, which is why a site can tell that someone at your connection visited but not which device did.

This distinction matters for a practical reason. When a service asks you to allow-list your IP address, it means the public one shown here. When you are configuring a printer or a media server at home, it means the private one, which this page cannot see.

How Accurate Is the Location, Really?

Geolocation is not a measurement. There is no positioning data in an IP address, and nothing about the number describes a place. What exists is a database mapping ranges of addresses to locations, built from registry records, provider disclosures and inference. Accuracy therefore varies enormously by field.

The coordinates row is worth dwelling on. When a database has no precise information it often returns a default point for the region, which is how entirely unrelated addresses end up mapped to the same spot. It looks like precision and is not.

Two situations make city-level results wrong almost by default. Mobile data routes through gateways that may be in another city entirely, so a phone can appear a hundred kilometres from where it is. Business and university connections often route through a central office, which is why a remote worker can appear at their employer's headquarters.

What Your Address Reveals, and What It Does Not

A website you visit can see your IP address without you doing anything. From it, with a lookup like this one, it can reasonably infer your country, your internet provider and an approximate area. That is the extent of it.

What it does not reveal is your name, your address, your identity, or anything about you personally. The mapping from an address to a subscriber is held by your provider and released to third parties only under legal process. From outside, an IP address identifies a connection, not a person.

Your provider is in a different position. They allocated the address, so they can connect it to your account, and they see which sites you connect to. Encryption protects the contents of what you send; it does not hide who you are talking to. Our guide to what your IP address and DNS actually reveal works through this in more detail.

Why the Number Changes

Most residential connections receive a dynamic address, reassigned from a pool. It commonly changes when the router restarts, when a lease expires, or when the provider reorganises its network. A static address stays fixed and is normally a paid business option, because it is what running a server reachable from outside requires.

There is a third arrangement that surprises people. Because IPv4 addresses ran short years ago, many providers place multiple subscribers behind a single public address using carrier-grade translation. If that is your situation, you share a public IP with strangers, and neither incoming connections nor port forwarding will work regardless of how your router is configured. The symptom is usually that the address shown here does not appear anywhere in your router's own settings.

IPv4 and IPv6 Side by Side

You may be shown either format, or both, depending on your connection.

The last row is a genuine trade-off rather than a flaw. IPv6 removes the address shortage and, without privacy extensions, would make a single device easier to follow across sites than a shared IPv4 address does. Modern operating systems rotate their IPv6 addresses for exactly this reason.

When a VPN Changes the Answer and When It Does Not

A VPN routes your traffic through another server, so the address a site sees becomes the VPN's rather than yours. Reload this page on a VPN and the result should change — if it does not, the tunnel is not carrying your traffic.

What a VPN moves is the answer to "where does this connection appear to come from". It does not make you anonymous. Sites still identify returning visitors through accounts, cookies and browser characteristics, none of which the tunnel touches. If you log in, you have identified yourself regardless of the address.

Two leaks are worth checking rather than assuming. If DNS queries bypass the tunnel, your provider still sees every domain you look up even though the traffic itself is encrypted elsewhere. And browser features that establish direct peer connections have historically been able to expose a local address. A VPN that changes the result here has passed the basic test, not every test.

What to Do With This Page

• Allow-listing. Copy the public address when a service asks you to authorise your connection — and remember it will stop working when a dynamic address changes.
• Confirming a VPN is active. Compare the result with and without the tunnel. Country and provider should both change.
• Explaining a geo-restriction. If a service thinks you are in the wrong country, this shows what it is seeing.
• Reporting a fault. Support teams routinely ask for your public address and the provider name, both of which are shown above.

To look up the records behind a domain rather than your own connection, use the DNS lookup tool, and the internet speed test measures what the connection is actually delivering.

An address on its own is not very revealing. What it is attached to usually is, and the rest of the connection and domain tools let you check the records that sit behind it.

IP Address Questions