What Is My IP Address

Your public IP address is how the internet finds its way back to you. When you opened this page, your request carried that address so the server knew where to send its reply. It is assigned by your internet provider, and the value above is what the internet sees for your connection right now.

Behind it sits a second, private address that never leaves your home. Your router holds the public one and hands local addresses to each device, rewriting every outgoing request to use the public one and sorting replies back. That is why a phone, a laptop and a console on the same Wi-Fi all look identical to a website.

There are two addressing systems in use, and this page labels which one your connection is on. IPv4 is the original: a 32-bit number written as four groups, like 203.0.113.42, giving roughly 4.3 billion addresses in total. That pool was effectively exhausted years ago, and the last free blocks were handed to the regional registries in 2011.

IPv6 is the replacement: 128 bits, written as eight groups of hexadecimal digits and often shortened with a double colon. The supply is so large that a single home connection is normally given a /64 prefix, which is more addresses than the whole of IPv4. Most modern connections are dual-stack and hold both at once, and which one a site sees depends on your provider, your router and how the site’s DNS answers. Seeing IPv4 here is still perfectly normal; the IPv6 test tells you whether you have the newer stack at all.

The city and region shown are an educated guess, not a fix on your position. They come from commercial databases that map blocks of addresses to places using registry records, routing tables and past observations. Nothing is measured, it is inference from who owns the range.

In practice these databases frequently disagree with each other about the same address, and providers often register an entire regional block at a head-office city, so the reading can point at a hub you have never visited. Country level is usually right, city level is often wrong by tens or hundreds of kilometres, and mobile and satellite connections are the least precise of all. A VPN simply shows the exit server’s city instead.

When IPv4 addresses ran short, providers found a way to reuse them. Under carrier-grade NAT, often shortened to CGNAT, many customers share a single public address. Inside the provider’s network each subscriber still gets an address from the reserved shared range 100.64.0.0/10, but on the public internet they all emerge through the same one.

Mobile networks do this almost universally, and a growing number of fixed-line providers do it too. The consequence is worth holding on to: the address above may not be yours alone. It can be shared by thousands of subscribers at once, and the provider tells their connections apart by port number rather than by address. That also means restarting your router will not change it.

On its own, an IP address tells a website three practical things: which provider you use, roughly where you are, and a way to recognise further requests from the same connection while you browse. That is enough for content localisation, regional licensing, fraud scoring and simple rate limiting, and it is why almost every web server logs it by default.

The bigger picture is combination. Advertisers and analytics services can tie an address to a household, and a provider can link it straight to a subscriber’s account. To an ordinary website it does not hand over your name, but it is a persistent, real-world identifier attached to a paying customer, which is exactly why so many people choose to mask it. The ASN lookup shows the network behind an address in more detail.

An address is often treated as though it were an identity, and it is not. It cannot tell a site your name, your street, which device in the house made a request, or whether you are the account holder. Everyone behind one router shares it, and everyone behind one carrier-grade NAT shares it with strangers.

It also fails as a privacy verdict in both directions. A datacenter address is a strong hint of a VPN or proxy, but a tunnel that exits through ordinary residential addresses looks like a home connection, so “no VPN detected” is not proof that there is none. The reverse is also true: a datacenter address is not automatically a VPN. The VPN and proxy detection test examines those patterns in more depth.

You cannot switch your IP off, every connection needs one, but you can control which address others see.

• Use a VPN. Traffic leaves through the provider’s server, so sites see that address and its city. This tool will then report the VPN’s IP and location instead of yours.
• Use the Tor Browser. Requests pass through several relays, so no single server knows both who you are and where you are going.
• Restart your router. On a dynamic connection this often pulls a fresh address, though it will not help behind carrier-grade NAT.
• Check for leaks. Hiding your address is pointless if it escapes elsewhere. Run the WebRTC leak test and the DNS leak test after you connect.