What it does
This page shows the IP address our server saw your request arrive from, along with what a geolocation database makes of it and which network operator it belongs to. That is the address every website you visit sees, so it is the one that matters for questions about blocking, geo-restrictions and privacy.
It is almost certainly not the address your device thinks it has. Your laptop or phone probably holds something like 192.168.1.24 — a private address handed out by your router, meaningful only inside your own network and invisible from the internet. What we see is your router's public address, or your ISP's shared carrier-grade NAT address, or your VPN's exit node if one is running.
How it works
When your browser opens a connection to us, the packets carry a source address so our server knows where to send the reply. There is nothing to detect or probe — the address is simply the return address on the envelope. We read it, classify it, look it up in a geolocation database held on our own server, and show you the result.
Why the answer is fetched separately
The address is not baked into this page's HTML. It is requested by a small piece of JavaScript after the page loads, and there is a specific reason: this page is cached and served to many visitors. A cache — ours, your ISP's, a CDN's, or your browser's — stores one copy of the HTML and hands the same bytes to everyone who asks. If we embedded your address in that HTML, the next visitor could be served a page showing your address. Keeping the personal part in a separate, explicitly uncacheable request means the shared page stays shared and the personal answer stays personal.
Why you only see one address family
A single TCP connection has exactly one address family. Your browser either reached us over IPv4 or over IPv6, and we can only report whichever one carried the request. So a result like 81.2.69.142 is labelled IPv4, and one like 2a00:23c5:1e00:1::1 is labelled IPv6 — never both at once from one request. If you have a dual-stack connection you have both addresses, and which one appears here depends on which your device and our network preferred at that moment. Modern setups usually prefer IPv6.
The time zone comes from your browser, not your address
The time zone shown is read from your device settings via Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone — the same setting your clock uses. It is not derived from your IP address, and that makes it considerably more reliable than the location fields: it is what you configured, rather than what a database guessed. If the time zone and the geolocated city disagree, the time zone is much more likely to be the correct one. This is labelled on the result so you can tell the two apart.
What your IP does and does not reveal
It does reveal your approximate region — usually the right country, often the wrong city — and your internet provider or mobile carrier. It also reveals whether you are on a consumer connection, a corporate network, or a datacentre, which is how sites detect VPNs and bots.
It does not reveal your name, your street address, your email, your browsing history or anything on your device. An IP address on its own points at a connection, and that connection is usually shared: everyone in your household, everyone in the office, or thousands of strangers behind the same carrier-grade NAT address.
The exception worth understanding: your ISP can link it to you. It assigned the address, and it keeps records of which subscriber held which address at which time. Those records can be disclosed under a lawful request. Nobody else has that mapping — which is why an IP address is a weak identifier for a website and a strong one for the provider.
Under UK GDPR an IP address counts as personal data, and the Information Commissioner's Office is the authority on what that obliges anyone who stores them to do.
Common uses
- Setting up remote access: a firewall allowlist, a game server, or a VPN endpoint needs the public address you are actually coming from, not your local one.
- Checking a VPN is working: load this page with the VPN off, then on. If the address and operator change, traffic is going through the tunnel. If they do not, it is not.
- Diagnosing CGNAT: if the address shown is in
100.64.0.0/10, or differs from what your router reports as its WAN address, your ISP is sharing one public address between customers — which is why port forwarding will not work. - Explaining a block or a wrong-country error: seeing the address and operator a site sees is the first step in working out why it thinks you are somewhere you are not.
- Support calls: plenty of helpdesks ask for your public IP; this is the quickest way to read it off.
Frequently asked
Why does my IP address change?
Most home connections use dynamic allocation. Your router leases an address from the ISP via DHCP for a fixed period and renews it; if the lease expires while the router is off, or the ISP reorganises its pool, or you reboot the router, you may come back with a different one. Mobile connections change more often still, sometimes as you move between parts of the network. A static address that never changes is usually a paid business option. On IPv6 there is a further wrinkle: privacy extensions deliberately rotate the device portion of your address periodically.
Is my IP address private information?
It is personal data under UK GDPR, but it is not secret. Every website you load, every app that phones home and every server you connect to necessarily sees it — it has to, or it could not reply. Treat it as visible-by-design rather than confidential. There is no need to hide it from a screenshot, but there is a good reason for a site that stores it to say so in its privacy notice.
What is the difference between my public and private IP?
Your private address (typically 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x or 172.16–31.x.x) is assigned by your router and is only meaningful inside your own network — the same addresses are in use in millions of other homes simultaneously. Your public address is the single address your router presents to the internet on behalf of every device behind it. Network Address Translation rewrites the addresses on outgoing packets and keeps track of which internal device each reply belongs to. We can only ever see the public one; to see your private address, check your device's network settings or your router's admin page.
How do I hide my IP address?
You cannot remove it — something has to be there for replies to come back to — but you can substitute someone else's. A VPN routes your traffic through a server that connects on your behalf, so sites see the VPN's address. A proxy does the same at the application level. Tor relays traffic through several volunteer nodes, so the exit node's address is what sites see. All three change the address; none makes it disappear.
Does a VPN make me anonymous?
No, and it is worth being clear-eyed about what it actually does: it moves trust rather than removing it. Your ISP stops seeing which sites you visit; the VPN provider starts seeing it instead, and you have no way to audit their logging claims. Meanwhile the sites you visit still identify you through accounts you log into, cookies, and browser fingerprinting — none of which a VPN touches. A VPN is genuinely useful for hiding traffic from a network operator, avoiding an ISP's records, and appearing to be in another country. It is not anonymity.
Why is my IP showing a different city?
Because the city is a database estimate, not a measurement. If the provider has no fine-grained data for your address block, it falls back to your ISP's registered location, the nearest network hub it does know about, or a regional default. Mobile and CGNAT connections are the worst offenders, since traffic is broken out through a gateway that may be a long way from you. The time zone shown on this page comes from your own device settings and is usually right even when the city is wrong.
Do you store my IP address?
No. The address is looked up and returned to your browser, and the geolocation database is held on our own server rather than a third-party API, so your address is not transferred to anyone else in order to answer the question. Our privacy policy sets out exactly what we do and do not keep.
Related tools
- IP address lookup — do the same lookup on any address, not just your own.
- User agent parser — what your browser reveals about your device and software on every request.
See how we build and verify our tools. Geolocation data is from MaxMind GeoLite2.