How to use
- Your own public IP address and its details appear as soon as the page loads.
- To look up a different address, type it in the box and press Look up.
- Both IPv4 and IPv6 are accepted.
- Private and reserved addresses are identified locally, without any query being sent.
About IP addresses and what they reveal
Your public IP address is the address the rest of the internet sees when you connect. It is
assigned by your provider, not by your device, and the address your computer knows about
itself — typically something like 192.168.1.42 — is a private one, meaningful only inside
your own network. That is why a browser cannot simply report your public address: it does not
know it. Something outside has to say what it saw.
What an address reveals is more limited than commonly assumed. There is no location encoded
in an IP address. Geolocation databases infer one from registration records, routing
announcements and measured latency, and the inference gets weaker the more precise it tries
to be. Country is usually correct. City is frequently wrong. Mobile connections often place
you at the operator’s gateway, which can be in another province entirely, and a corporate
network may report its headquarters for every employee worldwide.
The reliable part is the network itself. The ASN — Autonomous System Number — identifies
the network that announces the route to that address, and it comes from the routing table the
internet genuinely uses, not from an inferred database. When a lookup says AS15169 / Google,
that is a fact about how traffic reaches the address. When it says a city, that is an
estimate. This tool separates the two rather than presenting them with equal confidence.
One consequence worth knowing: an IP address is not a person. On carrier-grade NAT, standard
on mobile networks, thousands of subscribers share one public address at the same time.
Addresses are also reassigned, so the one you have today may have belonged to someone else
last week. Treating an IP as an identity — for blocking, for attribution, for anything with
consequences — is unreliable in both directions.
Frequently asked questions
Is my IP address logged?
No. Your address is read from the connection you already made in order to load this page, shown back to you, and not stored. There is no database here and no analytics event carrying it. Cloudflare, which serves this site, necessarily processes your IP to route the request — that is true of every website you visit and is covered in our privacy policy.
Why does my own IP show a city, but looking up another address does not?
Two different sources. Your own details come from the connection itself: Cloudflare already determined your approximate location to route the request efficiently, so city, timezone and coordinates are available. Looking up an arbitrary address uses Cloudflare Radar, which reports the country, the network and the operator, but not the city. Fields that source does not provide are shown as unavailable rather than filled with a guess.
The city shown is not where I am. Is the lookup wrong?
Almost certainly not wrong — just imprecise, and predictably so. A residential or mobile connection is usually placed at the operator's regional gateway rather than at your building. A China Telecom address in Guangdong province, for example, commonly resolves to Guangzhou for subscribers anywhere in that province, Shenzhen included. The country is nearly always right, the network and ASN are facts drawn from routing data, and the city is an estimate. This tool separates those two groups on the page for exactly this reason.
How accurate is IP geolocation?
Country level is usually right. City level is often wrong, sometimes by hundreds of kilometres. An IP address has no inherent location — databases infer one from registration records, routing behaviour and observed latency. A mobile connection may appear at the operator's gateway rather than where you are standing, and a corporate network may report its headquarters for every employee in the world.
Can an IP address identify my home address?
No. It identifies the network you are connecting through, not a residence. Your ISP can map an address to a subscriber account at a point in time, but that mapping is not public and is normally disclosed only under legal process. Sites that claim to show a visitor's street address from their IP are showing the geographic midpoint of a range, which is why some arbitrary properties have become notorious for receiving misdirected visitors.
What is an ASN?
An Autonomous System Number identifies a network that independently decides how traffic is routed — an ISP, a hosting provider, a large company. It is the most reliable thing an IP lookup tells you, because it comes from the routing table the internet actually uses rather than from an inferred database. AS15169 is Google, AS13335 is Cloudflare.
Why does my IP differ from what another site reports?
Most commonly because one of them showed your IPv6 address and the other your IPv4 — many connections have both. A VPN or corporate proxy will also change what the world sees. And on a carrier-grade NAT connection, common on mobile networks, thousands of subscribers share a single public address, so yours is not uniquely yours.
Why can I not look up 192.168.1.1?
Because it has no public owner. That range, along with 10.x and 172.16–31.x, is reserved for private networks — the same addresses are in use simultaneously inside millions of homes and offices. There is nothing to look up. The tool tells you this immediately rather than sending a query that would fail.