What is my IP Address & Location?

What is an IP address, exactly?

An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a numerical label assigned to every device that connects to the internet. Think of it as the postal address of your computer, phone or router. Without it, no website, app or game server would know where to send the data you requested. Every time you load a page, your IP travels with the request so the response can find its way back.

There are two versions in use today. IPv4, the original 1981 standard defined in RFC 791, uses 32-bit addresses in the familiar dotted format like 123.50.119.62 and offers roughly 4.3 billion unique addresses. IPv6, defined in RFC 8200, uses 128 bits like 2001:db8::1 and offers an effectively limitless pool (340 undecillion). Most modern networks run both stacks side by side: roughly 46% of all internet traffic is now IPv6, according to Google's public IPv6 measurement. For a deeper look, see our IPv4 vs IPv6 explainer.

What can your IP address actually reveal?

Quite a lot, and not as much as people sometimes fear. Your public IP tells any website you visit:

• Your approximate location: usually accurate at the country level (about 99% of the time), often correct at the city level (60–80% of the time), and rarely accurate to a street. The detection above uses a multi-source cascade so the location stays sensible even if one provider's database is stale.
• Your Internet Service Provider and connection type: home fibre, mobile carrier, business line, satellite, or commercial VPN. The card above pulls the ISP straight from the ASN registry.
• Your Autonomous System Number (ASN): a unique identifier for the network operator routing your traffic across the public internet.
• Whether you're behind a proxy or VPN: most geolocation APIs flag IPs known to belong to data centres or commercial VPNs.

What it does not reveal on its own: your name, your exact street address, your full browsing history, your email or your phone number. That information is only linked to your IP inside your ISP's billing system, and ISPs only release it under a valid court order. Where the risk really starts is when an IP is combined with cookies, account logins, or browser fingerprinting. Our full breakdown is in what does your IP address actually reveal about you and the threat-model piece can someone find you with just your IP.

How does IP geolocation work?

IP geolocation is the process of mapping a numerical IP address to a physical location: a country, a region, a city, sometimes a postcode. It is not GPS. There is no signal coming from your device that says "I'm here." The lookup is a database query, and the database is built from public registries (RIPE, ARIN, APNIC), ISP-published routing tables, traceroute probes, and crowdsourced data.

The most respected providers (MaxMind GeoLite2, IP2Location, ipinfo.io, DB-IP) publish their accuracy claims openly. MaxMind, for example, reports about 76% city-level accuracy within 25 km on the global level, with major variation by country: above 95% in the US and UK, below 50% in some parts of Africa and the Middle East. We compared eight free geolocation APIs side by side in our free IP geolocation APIs comparison.

The lookup process has several real-world failure modes. Mobile data often resolves to a carrier aggregation point hundreds of kilometres away from the actual phone. VPNs always show their exit server's location. Satellite ISPs like Starlink route through a small number of ground stations, so a user in Iceland might appear to be in Germany. And IP blocks change owners regularly: when an ISP transfers a /16 to a different country, geolocation databases can take weeks to catch up. See how accurate is IP geolocation for real numbers and a famous case study (the MaxMind Kansas farm incident).

Why might my detected location be wrong?

If the city on this page doesn't match where you are, one of the following is almost certainly the cause:

• You're on mobile data. Your phone's IP traces back to your carrier's gateway, often in a major city far from where you physically are.
• You're behind a VPN or proxy. The lookup returns the exit node's location, not yours. This is how streaming services notice you and is detailed in how Netflix and Disney+ detect VPNs.
• You're on a corporate or institutional network (university, hospital, large office). These networks route everything through a central NAT, so all users appear at the same address.
• The database is stale. ISPs reassign IP blocks regularly; databases take days or weeks to update. The same IP that was in Paris last month may now be in Brussels.
• The ISP doesn't publish accurate location data. Some smaller or rural ISPs simply don't register precise PoP locations, so geolocation falls back to the country capital.

How to hide your IP address

If you'd rather not broadcast your IP and approximate location to every site you load, there are exactly five workable methods in 2026, ranked by anonymity:

1. A commercial VPN — encrypts your traffic and replaces your IP with one of the provider's servers. Fast, easy, and the most popular choice. Recommended for streaming, public Wi-Fi, ISP throttling avoidance.
2. The Tor browser — routes your traffic through three random volunteer relays. Slow but offers the strongest anonymity available to the public.
3. An HTTP or SOCKS5 proxy — single hop, no encryption by default, useful for one-off geolocation bypass but not for privacy.
4. Switching to mobile data — gives you a new IP belonging to your mobile carrier, often resolving to a different city.
5. A different network (a friend's house, public Wi-Fi, a coworking space) — changes the IP entirely but trades one set of risks for another.

The full comparison with speed, anonymity score and cost is in our pillar piece how to hide your IP address: 5 methods that work and the longer 9 ways to hide your IP. Before signing up for any VPN it's worth knowing whether VPN use is legal in your country: yes in most places (US, EU, UK, Canada, Japan), restricted or banned in a small number (China, Russia, Iran, UAE, Belarus, Turkmenistan, North Korea).

Common reasons people look up their IP

Is this IP lookup tool safe and private?

Yes. The detection runs entirely in your browser. We don't have a database, don't log requests, don't set tracking cookies, and don't share your data with advertisers. The IP and location numbers you see come from a cascade of public geolocation APIs (Cloudflare's same-origin /cdn-cgi/trace, then ipwho.is, reallyfreegeoip.org and freeipapi.com as fallbacks). Each provider has its own privacy policy; we recommend reading them if that matters to you.

The site is hosted as static HTML on Cloudflare Pages: there is no backend, no PHP, no database, no session, nothing to hack. Even the open-source code generating these pages contains no data collection logic. Read our full privacy statement for the formal version.

The complete library — 20 articles on IP, privacy, VPN and streaming

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