What Is My IP Address?

The badge next to your address above says whether you reached this page over IPv4 or IPv6. Both do the same job. They differ in length, in how they are written and in how many addresses exist.

Many connections are "dual stack": your provider gives you both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address, and your browser picks one for each site. That is why two IP checkers can show two different addresses for the same device, and both can be correct.

An IP address identifies a network connection, not a person. Anyone who sees it can look it up in a public geolocation database, the same way this page does.

What a website can usually tell

• Your country, and often your region and city, as an estimate.
• Your internet provider or the organisation that owns the address range.
• Whether the address belongs to a data centre, VPN or proxy rather than a home line.
• Whether you are on IPv4 or IPv6.

What it does not tell

• Your name, email address or phone number.
• Your street address. The map pin marks an estimated area, not your home.
• Which person in a household or office was using the connection.
• Your browsing history.

Only your internet provider can link an address and a timestamp to a customer account, and it normally releases that information only through a legal process.

IP geolocation is a lookup in a database, not a GPS reading. Country-level results are generally reliable; city-level results are a best guess. Common reasons for a wrong pin:

• Your provider routes traffic through another city. The database records where the provider registered or announces the address block, which may be a regional hub far from you.
• Mobile networks. Phone carriers send many customers out through a small number of gateways, so the location is often the gateway's city.
• Carrier-grade NAT. Some providers share one public address between many customers in different towns.
• VPNs, proxies and corporate networks. You see the location of the exit server, not your own.
• Recently reassigned addresses. Address blocks are sold and moved between regions, and databases take time to catch up.

If the city is wrong, nothing is broken on your side and there is nothing to fix on your device. Sites that need a precise position ask for it separately through your browser's location permission.

Hiding an IP and changing it are different goals. If you only need a new address, for example to retest something or after a provider-side block, these are the usual options:

1. Restart your router. With a dynamic address, reconnecting may give you a new one. Some providers keep the same address for days or weeks, so it does not always work.
2. Switch networks. Moving from Wi-Fi to mobile data, or to a different Wi-Fi network, changes your public address immediately.
3. Use a VPN or proxy. Sites see the address of the server you connect through. A VPN encrypts the traffic between you and that server; many plain proxies do not.
4. Use Tor. Traffic leaves through a volunteer-run exit relay. It is slower and some sites block it.
5. Ask your provider. They can assign a new address, or a static one if you need it to stay the same for remote access or allowlists.

After any of these, press Refresh above to confirm the new address. If you are allowlisting an address in a server config, a static IP avoids repeating the job every time it changes; the .htaccess and Nginx generator covers the redirect side of the same config files.

When the page loads, your browser makes one request to our server. The server reads the address your request arrived from (the connection address forwarded by our hosting platform) and looks it up with a third-party IP geolocation service. It returns the address, country, region, city, approximate coordinates, provider name, and two flags saying whether the address looks like a proxy/VPN or a hosting provider.

• IPv4 or IPv6 is decided simply by the format of the address.
• The map is drawn from the approximate coordinates on OpenStreetMap tiles, and only when the lookup returns coordinates.
• The VPN / proxy check is a simple indicator with two states: "detected" when the address is flagged as a proxy, VPN or hosting network, and "not detected" for a direct connection. It is not a score and not an audit of your device or browser.
• The tool shows your public address only. It cannot see private addresses inside your network such as 192.168.x.x.

The same principle applies to every server-side tool: when you run the broken link checker, the sites being checked see our server's address, not yours.