IPIP Lookup

This tool calls an external service

Unlike the other tools here, this one can't complete in the browser. A browser has no way to know its own public IP, so it must ask a service that reports what it observes from outside. This tool queries ipinfo.io, and in doing so your connecting IP is shared with that service.

In practice this reveals nothing extra — every website you visit sees your connecting IP anyway. But the 'everything runs in your browser' claim that applies to this site's other tools does not apply here, and that's worth stating plainly.

Public and private IPs are different addresses

Open your device's network settings at home or in an office and you'll see something like 192.168.x.x. That's a private IP handed out by your router, and it isn't routable on the internet. When traffic leaves for the internet, the router rewrites the source to its own public IP via NAT — so every device on the network appears externally as a single public address.

It's therefore normal for the address shown here to differ from the one in your device settings. When you need to add an allow-list rule on a server, use the public IP shown here.

How to use it

1. Open the page to see the public IP of your current connection along with related details.
2. Compare with your VPN or proxy on and off to confirm the tunnel is actually in effect.
3. When you need an IP for a firewall allow list, use the value shown here.
4. To see whether it changes, refresh after a while — residential connections usually have dynamic IPs.

Why the location is imprecise

IP geolocation works nothing like GPS. It looks up databases recording which carrier an address block was allocated to and which regions that carrier uses it in — data itself inferred from registration records and observation.

City-level accuracy is usually serviceable; anything finer is not trustworthy. When a carrier reassigns a block to a different region, results stay wrong until the databases catch up. Mobile data resolves to the carrier's gateway rather than a cell tower, which can be hundreds of kilometers off. Connections behind CGNAT or a corporate VPN behave the same way.

So designing blocks or hard restrictions on the basis of IP location means accepting false positives. Region-based features are safer when paired with a way for the user to choose directly.

What an IP does and doesn't reveal

• Does: the ISP or organization, the autonomous system number (ASN), an approximate country and city, and whether it's a datacenter or cloud range
• Does: whether several requests came from the same IP — though that may be several people sharing a network
• Doesn't: an individual's identity. The records linking an IP to a subscriber are held by the carrier and are not obtainable without legal process.
• Doesn't: a precise address or coordinates. Anything below city level is inference.
• Doesn't: how many people sit behind it. With NAT or CGNAT, hundreds or thousands can share one address.

The trap in reading client IPs server-side

When your application sits behind a load balancer or CDN, the TCP connection's source address is the proxy's. The original client IP arrives in the X-Forwarded-For header, so that's what you read — and here is the security catch: anyone can attach that header with any value they like.

Trusting it blindly lets attackers bypass IP-based access restrictions and rate limits. The correct approach is to use only the value at the position your trusted proxy appended. X-Forwarded-For accumulates comma-separated entries at each hop, so you must decide which entry to use by counting from your trust boundary. Most frameworks expose a trust-proxy setting; the essential part is configuring it to match your actual infrastructure.

Frequently Asked Questions

My IP keeps changing. Is that normal?

Yes. Residential internet generally uses dynamic addresses, and you get a new one after a router reboot or when the lease expires under your carrier's policy. A static IP usually has to be requested separately and paid for. This is also why IP-based firewall allow lists break so often with remote workers.

I turned on a VPN but my IP hasn't changed.

Either the tunnel isn't actually established, or split tunneling is routing browser traffic around it. DNS-only leaks also happen, so check for DNS leakage alongside the IP. And a browser-extension proxy applies only to traffic the extension handles, not to your whole system.

Why are both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses shown?

Most connections today are dual stack. Traffic goes over IPv6 when the destination supports it and IPv4 otherwise, so different connections may use different addresses. Both are yours, and a server-side allow list may need both registered.

Can I find someone's location from their IP?

Only a city-level estimate, and for the reasons above even that is often wrong. An individual's real address or identity cannot be determined from an IP alone. Collecting or tracking other people's IPs for that purpose may also violate privacy law depending on jurisdiction.

Can I hide my IP?

A VPN, proxy, or Tor changes the address the destination sees. But changing your IP doesn't make you anonymous — browser fingerprints, cookies, and logged-in sessions remain as identifying paths. And your VPN provider learns your real IP, so it's closer to shifting who you trust than removing the exposure.

Can I be blocked because of someone else on my IP?

Yes. Under CGNAT or on an office network many users share one public address, so abuse from that address really does get unrelated users blocked alongside. If you operate a service, account-level controls alongside IP blocking mitigate the collateral damage.