My IP address: how to find it and what sites see
Every site you open sees one address: the public IP your traffic leaves from. It tells a site less about you than many people fear, but more than nothing.
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How to find your IP
Open the My IP page on this site; the check above shows it too. You get the address your connection uses right now, whether it is IPv4 or IPv6, and the reverse DNS name if your provider set one.
An address such as 192.168.1.20 in your router or in the network settings of your computer is a local address. It works only inside your home network, and websites never see it unless WebRTC leaks it, which current browsers prevent.
What a website learns from your IP
- The country. Address ranges belong to networks, and routing data shows which country a network is registered in. That is the country of your provider, which is usually, though not always, where you are.
- The provider and its network number (ASN): your home internet provider, your mobile operator, a company or a hosting provider.
- The type of network. Data center and hosting ranges are well known, and so are Tor exits. A visit from such an address often means a VPN, a proxy or a bot.
- Roughly the city, if the site pays for a geolocation database. Accuracy varies a lot, and on mobile networks it is often the city where the operator routes its traffic.
A site does not learn your name, your street address or your phone number from the IP. Only the provider can tell which subscriber had an address at a given moment, and it gives that out on a legal request.
The IP address of a phone
On mobile data the phone gets its address from the operator, and the address changes often: after a restart, when you move, or simply every few hours. Many operators put hundreds or thousands of subscribers behind one public IPv4 address (carrier-grade NAT), so that address says even less about one person.
Many operators also give phones an IPv6 address. A site that supports IPv6 then sees a long address with colons instead of four numbers. On Wi-Fi the phone uses the public address of the router, the same one your computer has.
Why sites show you different addresses
- Your connection has both IPv4 and IPv6, and one site is reached over IPv6 while another only speaks IPv4.
- A VPN, a proxy or iCloud Private Relay is on in one browser or app and off in another.
- Your provider changed the address. Most home connections get a new one from time to time unless you pay for a static address.
What a VPN changes and what it leaves
A VPN replaces your IP with the address of the VPN server, so sites see that country and provider instead of yours. Your time zone, languages and browser fingerprint stay the same, and a poorly set up VPN can still leak your real address through WebRTC or send your DNS requests to your own provider.
This is why anti-fraud systems look at more than the address. SpoofLens compares the IP country with the time zone of the browser, checks WebRTC and the DNS resolver, and marks data center addresses, Tor exits and proxy headers. iCloud Private Relay is marked as privacy protection and costs no points.
If websites keep showing you captchas
Your address may have a poor reputation. It belongs to a data center or a VPN, many people share it, or it landed in a spam blacklist because of someone else on the same network. The My IP page can check an IPv4 address against five public spam lists.
Tools and guides on this topic
- My IP: address, provider and anonymity check
- Full browser check
- Check an IP against spam blacklists
- IP reputation: how sites judge an address
Frequently asked questions
- Can someone find my home address from my IP?
- No. The IP points to a provider network and roughly a region. Only the provider knows which subscriber used the address at a given time.
- Does incognito mode hide my IP?
- No. Private mode only stops the browser from keeping history and cookies after you close the window. Sites see the same address.
- What is a dynamic IP?
- An address the provider can change at any time. Most home connections and almost all mobile ones have one. A static IP stays the same and usually costs extra.
- Is my IP stored when I open the My IP page?
- No. The page is not cached and the lookup result is not saved. The privacy policy describes what the site does keep.