What Is My IP

About What Is My IP

See your public IP address — the number the internet uses to send things back to you — along with the country it points to and whether you appear to be behind a VPN.

Then, next to it, something more interesting: everything your browser tells every website you visit, without being asked and without any permission prompt.

Free, no account, no tracking, and no log is kept of your visit.

Why this tool has to touch the internet

Every other tool on this site works entirely inside your browser and says so. This one cannot, and it is worth explaining why rather than glossing over it.

Your browser does not know your public IP address. It genuinely does not. That number is assigned by your internet provider and only becomes visible when a server on the far side looks at where a request arrived from. There is no JavaScript that can read it locally, because locally it does not exist.

So the only way to find it is to ask a server — and that server sees your IP in the act of answering. That is unavoidable and true of every "what is my IP" page anywhere.

What we can promise is how *little* goes with it: the request is empty. No file, no name, no cookie, no identifier. It exists only to be looked at. And the whole right-hand column needs no request at all.

Public and private — two different addresses

Your device has two addresses, and they do completely different jobs. Mixing them up is the most common confusion about home networking.

Your public IP address is the one the internet sees. It belongs to your router, not to your device — everything in your home shares it. Your laptop, your phone, your TV and your neighbour on the same Wi-Fi all appear to the outside world as the same number.

Your private IP address is the one your router handed to *this* device so it can tell your gadgets apart. It almost always begins with 192.168., 10. or 172.16–31. Those ranges are reserved and can never be reached from the internet, which is why millions of homes reuse the very same numbers with no conflict at all.

A rough picture: your public IP is the street address of the building; your private IP is the flat number inside it. The postman needs the first; only people already in the building use the second.

You need the private one to reach a printer, set up port forwarding, connect to a NAS, cast to a TV or open a device's admin page. You need the public one for a firewall rule, a game server or an allow-list.

Why your private address is usually hidden

There is a good chance the private address above says *hidden by your browser*. Nothing is broken — that is a deliberate protection, and it is worth understanding.

The only way a web page can ever see your private address is a side effect of WebRTC, the technology behind video calls. To place a call, a browser lists the addresses it could be reached on, and a page can read that list. Advertisers noticed and began using it to fingerprint people across networks.

So around 2019, Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all changed it. They now replace your real local address with a random one-off name ending in .local, so pages get a meaningless string instead. Your browser is protecting you from this very page.

When it does show up: older browsers, some corporate or developer configurations, and cases where the site already has camera or microphone permission.

How to find it yourself, always:

• Windows — open Command Prompt and type ipconfig, then look for *IPv4 Address*
• macOS — System Settings, then Network, then Details
• Linux — ip addr in a terminal
• iPhone or Android — Settings, Wi-Fi, then tap the network you are on

Nothing here contacts a server to look for the private address. That lookup is entirely local, which is why it still works with the internet disconnected.

How accurate is the city?

Roughly right, often wrong, and never precise. It is worth knowing exactly how this works before trusting it.

Nobody looks up where you are. What happens is that your provider registers blocks of addresses against places, and a lookup service reads that registry. So the answer is where your provider routes that block, which may be your city, the nearest large city, or the city its equipment happens to sit in.

Here is the clearest demonstration, using this very page: two different lookup services routinely name two different cities for the same address. Not because one is broken — because both are estimating from the same imprecise registry.

What it is usually right about:

• The country — very reliable
• The provider — reliable
• The region — usually about right

What it is often wrong about:

• The city — frequently the wrong one, especially on mobile networks, where it can be hundreds of kilometres out
• Anything smaller than a city — treat as meaningless

This is why the map is optional, zoomed out, and labelled as your provider's routing point rather than your location. A tightly framed pin would imply a precision that does not exist.

Your IP address is not your address

This is the biggest misunderstanding about IP addresses, and it works in your favour.

An IP address points at your internet provider, not at you. Location lookups resolve to wherever your provider routes that block of addresses — often the right city, frequently the wrong one, sometimes a different region entirely. On a mobile network it may be a city hundreds of kilometres away.

Nobody can find your house from your IP address. What a website *can* do is see roughly what part of the world you are in, and which company sells you internet.

What identifies you far more precisely is the other column.

The part most people have not seen

Look at the right-hand side. Your browser, your operating system, your exact screen size, your time zone, your languages, how many processor cores you have, your graphics chip, whether you have a touch screen.

None of that was requested. There was no permission prompt. Every website you have ever visited could read all of it, and many do — because taken together those details are often unique enough to recognise the same visitor again without any cookie at all. That practice is called browser fingerprinting.

We show it here because seeing your own is more convincing than reading about it.

The map, and what the pin actually means

The map is not loaded until you press the button. An embedded map is a request to a mapping service, and loading one automatically would hand your address to that service on every visit whether you wanted a map or not.

When you do open it, read the pin carefully: it sits on your internet provider's equipment, not on you. It is the same estimate as the city above, drawn instead of written. The view is deliberately zoomed out, because framing it tightly around the point would dress up a rough guess as a street address.

Why the inline map is OpenStreetMap and not Google. Google Maps can no longer be placed in a frame on another website without an API key — the keyless embed now refuses with X-Frame-Options. The supported route is the Maps Embed API. That one is free with unlimited use, but it still needs a key, and a key on a page like this one is visible to everyone who views the source — so it has to be locked down and tied to a billing-enabled Google Cloud project. OpenStreetMap needs no key and costs nothing. The Open in Google Maps button is a plain link, so it works for anyone who prefers Google, also without a key.

IPv6

You may see two addresses, and both are yours.

IPv4 is the old, short kind — four numbers like 203.0.113.42. The world ran out of them years ago, which is why your provider probably shares one among many customers.

IPv6 is the new, long kind, with letters and colons. There are effectively unlimited numbers of them, so your device can have one all to itself.

If it says none on this connection, nothing is wrong. Plenty of providers still have not switched it on, and everything works exactly as before. It is worth knowing either way — an IPv6 address is often unique to your device, where an IPv4 address is usually shared with your whole neighbourhood.

Am I behind a VPN?

The tool compares the country of your IP address with the time zone your computer is set to. When those disagree, that is what a VPN or a proxy looks like from the outside.

It is a hint, not a verdict. Someone travelling with a laptop that still has their home time zone looks exactly the same. And if your VPN sets your time zone too, the check will not notice.

What you can do with it

• Find your public IP for a firewall rule, a game server, a remote desktop or an allow-list
• Find your private IP to reach a printer, a NAS, a router page or set up port forwarding
• Check a VPN is actually working before you rely on it — if the country has not changed, it is not on
• See whether your connection has IPv6 yet
• Show someone what a website can learn about them without asking. It changes minds.
• Check what a site sees after you change a browser or a privacy setting

Features

• Public and private addresses side by side, with a one-tap copy
• IPv4 and IPv6, and it says so plainly when a connection has no IPv6
• An optional map, loaded only if you ask for it
• Your internet provider, city, region and country, with an honest note on how approximate the city is
• A VPN check comparing your address against your computer's clock
• Around fifteen things your browser reveals with no request at all
• Three independent lookup sources, so a blocked one is not the end of it
• Says what is happening — if a privacy blocker stops the lookup, it tells you that is what happened rather than just failing
• No account, no tracking, no log of your visit

Good to know

• Your IP address changes. Most home connections get a new one every so often, and it changes completely on mobile data or a different Wi-Fi network.
• A privacy blocker may stop the lookup. Many blocklists include IP-lookup services. That is the blocker working correctly; the rest of the page still fills in.
• The location is approximate at best. Do not treat it as where anyone actually is.
• Hiding your IP does not make you anonymous if everything in the right-hand column still identifies your browser.

Related tools

• Microphone Test — check a microphone your browser can reach
• Webcam Test — check a camera, with nothing recorded
• Keyboard Test — check every key on your keyboard
• Image Metadata — see the hidden data your photos carry, including location
• Blur or Pixelate Part of a Photo — hide something before you share it
• GPS Coordinates — read exact coordinates off a map, far more precise than an IP

How to use it

• Nothing to do — both addresses appear as soon as the page opens
• Press Copy to put it on your clipboard
• Press Check again after switching a VPN on or off, to see it change
• Read the right-hand column — that is what every website you visit already knows about you