IP Address Lookup

This IP address lookup shows the public IP address your connection uses right now and the country it is most likely registered to. It also tells you whether the address is IPv4 or IPv6 and explains special addresses, such as private or carrier-grade NAT ranges, if one turns up. The page makes no third-party requests and saves nothing in your browser. It is one of the free ghacks tools.

What this IP address lookup shows

The card shows one public IP address, its type and an approximate country, and nothing that identifies you personally.

How to look up your IP address

Open the page and your address appears in the card within a moment; there is nothing to type.

1. Wait until the "Looking up your IP address..." line changes to your address under Your public IP address.
2. Click Copy. The button confirms with "Copied"; if your browser blocks the clipboard, the address is selected and the tool says "Press Ctrl+C".
3. After you switch a VPN on or off or change networks, click Check again to see the new address.

What is my IP address, public or local?

Your public IP address is the one the internet sees; your local IP address is the one your router gives each device at home. All devices behind one router normally share the same public address, while each has its own local address, such as 192.168.1.20. This tool shows the public one. To find your local IP address on Windows, use ipconfig or your router's admin page.

IPv4 or IPv6: why you see only one address

A single connection uses either IPv4 or IPv6, so the tool shows the address your browser picked this time. If your provider supports both (dual-stack), you also have an address of the other type that this check does not show. IPv6 addresses often change on their own: with privacy extensions, defined in RFC 8981, your device creates new temporary addresses regularly, so the IPv6 shown here can differ from one day to the next.

How accurate is IP location?

IP geolocation is usually right about the country, often right about the region and frequently wrong about the city; it can never find a house. The country on this page comes from Cloudflare's IP geolocation, which Cloudflare itself calls an estimate. Databases of this kind work with an accuracy radius; MaxMind gives radii of up to 1,000 km for its free GeoLite data. Mobile networks, carrier-grade NAT and VPNs make estimates worse, because many users share one address or appear at the provider's gateway. So the honest answer to tracking an IP address to an exact location is that it cannot be done from the address alone.

Addresses that cannot be looked up

Private, shared, loopback and link-local addresses only exist inside a local network, so no public database knows them. Websites normally never see them; if one appears in the card, a proxy, VPN or gateway passed it on, and the tool explains which range it is.

How to look up another IP address

For now this page checks only your own connection; a lookup for any IP address or hostname is coming. Until then, the command line answers the same questions. On Windows, macOS and Linux, nslookup 203.0.113.5 returns the reverse DNS name (PTR record) if one exists. On macOS and Linux, whois 203.0.113.5 shows the network that holds the address in its regional internet registry (RIR), with the registry country and an abuse contact. For many addresses from server logs, you can look up IP addresses offline from log files with a free Windows program.

Who can see your IP address

Every site and service you connect to sees your public IP address; a VPN, Tor or a relay such as iCloud Private Relay replaces it with one of theirs. Read more about who can see your IP address and what they can do with it. With a VPN on, the address in the card should belong to the VPN; if it still shows your own, check your VPN for IP leaks.

FAQ

Can someone find my exact location from my IP address?

No. An IP address points to a network, and location databases only estimate where that network is used, usually to the country and often to the region. Your provider knows which customer had an address at a given time, but it shares that only with authorities under a legal process. Websites, games or apps cannot get your street address from the IP alone.

Why does my IP address show the wrong country?

The country is an estimate, and it follows the network, not you. A VPN or relay shows its own exit location, mobile carriers often route traffic through a gateway in another region, and addresses that recently moved between providers can carry old data. If you use none of these and the country stays wrong, the geolocation data for that address range is out of date.

Does my IP address change?

Most home connections get a dynamic address that can change when the router reconnects or the provider renews it; some keep the same one for months. Static addresses are mainly sold to businesses. IPv6 addresses change more often, because privacy extensions create new temporary addresses. Click "Check again" after a router restart to see whether yours changed.

What happens to my IP address on this page?

After the page loads, your browser sends one request to an endpoint on ghacks' own server, which reads the address of that connection and returns it with the country estimate. The page loads no third-party scripts for this and saves nothing in your browser, and the address is never written to the page URL. Cloudflare processes all traffic to ghacks.net under its own privacy policy.

Sources

• Cloudflare: IP geolocation
• IANA IPv4 Special-Purpose Address Registry and IANA IPv6 Special-Purpose Address Registry
• RFC 1918: Address Allocation for Private Internets
• RFC 6598: Shared Address Space (100.64.0.0/10)
• RFC 8981: Temporary Address Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6
• MaxMind: GeoLite free geolocation data