What Is My IP Address

About What Is My IP

Two questions in one page. The first is the one a browser cannot answer about itself: what address the rest of the internet sees you at. Everything a page knows about its own network comes from the machine it is running on, and behind a router, a mobile network or a VPN that is not the address anything else sees — so the server is asked, and it reports the address the request arrived from.

The second is what this page could learn about you without asking. The browser table is not fetched from anywhere: it is what any site reads the moment you open it — the browser and its engine, the languages, the time zone, the display preferences, the request headers. Listing it is the point. Together those values narrow a browser to a small group, which is how fingerprinting recognises a visitor with no cookie at all.

It stops at the browser. The machine underneath — the operating system, the screen, the processor, the memory — is not collected here, even though a page can read most of it: none of it is needed to answer "what is my address", and it is the part people least expect a web page to know.

The two halves stay on their own sides. The browser facts are read in the page and never sent; the only thing that goes to the server is the request that asks what address it came from, which is exactly what every request already reveals.

Behind a proxy or a CDN there is often a forwarded-for chain, and it is shown when there is one — which is how you tell a VPN, a corporate proxy or a Cloudflare hop from a direct connection.

The address itself is reported with everything publicly known about it, in the same words the IP Lookup tool uses for any address: the AS number and operator announcing it, the organisation and country the registry has it under, its registered city with a maps link, and the PTR name it resolves back to. The registered address is where the owner filed its paperwork — for a home connection, that is the ISP, not the street you are on.

Where it helps

• Reports the address the internet actually sees, which the browser itself cannot know.
• Adds the reverse name, the AS number and the registry record, so an address turns into a provider, a network and a country.
• Lists what the page can read about your browser without a permission prompt, and says why that matters.
• Stops at the browser: nothing about the machine, its screen or its hardware is collected.
• Shows the forwarded-for chain when a proxy or CDN added one.
• The browser half never leaves the page.

Limits

• It shows one address: the one the request arrived on. A machine with both IPv4 and IPv6 may reach other sites on the other one.
• The country, city and region are the registry's record for the address block — the owner's filed address, not a position. For a consumer connection that is usually the ISP's head office, which can be a long way from you.
• No true geolocation: placing an address on a map needs a geo-IP database, which this does not ship.
• The user agent can be changed, and increasingly is: treat the browser and system as what was claimed, not what is true.
• Some values are reported by one browser and not another, and are left out rather than guessed at when they are missing.
• Running the API locally shows a loopback address, because that is genuinely where the request came from.

Frequently asked questions

Why can a website see my IP at all?

Because it has to. An address is how the reply gets back to you: every request you make carries one. Hiding it means putting something in the middle — a VPN, a proxy or Tor — that makes its request on your behalf.

Why does it show an IPv6 address?

Because that is the one your connection used. A machine with both will often prefer IPv6, and a site that only speaks IPv4 will see a different address for you.

Is a VPN enough to hide me?

It changes the address, and it changes nothing in the browser table. Time zone, languages and the user agent still describe the same browser, which is why a VPN alone does not make it anonymous.

What is browser fingerprinting?

Recognising a visitor by the combination of things their browser reveals rather than by a cookie. No single value here identifies anyone; a dozen of them together usually do.

Why does it say a local address?

Because the API answering is running on your own machine, so the request really did come from it. Deployed on a server, it reports the address you reach that server from.

Related tools

• IP Lookup — Resolve addresses and reverse DNS for a host or IP
• WHOIS — Registry records for a domain, an IP address or an AS number
• DNS Lookup — Resolve A, AAAA, MX, TXT, NS, CNAME, SOA and CAA records
• HTTP Headers — Grade a site's security headers from A+ to F, see every response header, and get the fix for your server
• Port Checker — Test whether TCP ports accept connections
• Nmap Port Scanner — Scan a host's common TCP ports, Nmap style, and see what each open service says it is

More Network & DNS tools

• DNS Lookup — Resolve A, AAAA, MX, TXT, NS, CNAME, SOA and CAA records
• IP Lookup — Resolve addresses and reverse DNS for a host or IP
• Port Checker — Test whether TCP ports accept connections
• Nmap Port Scanner — Scan a host's common TCP ports, Nmap style, and see what each open service says it is
• Ping (TCP) — Measure connection latency with repeated TCP probes
• WHOIS — Registry records for a domain, an IP address or an AS number
• DNS Propagation Checker — The same name asked of resolvers worldwide, and of the zone's own servers
• Email Authentication Checker — SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX for a domain, read together
• Email Header Analyzer — The delivery path, the authentication results, and what a forgery looks like
• DKIM Lookup — A domain's DKIM keys, for a selector or by trying the common ones, and whether each is worth anything
• DMARC Lookup — A domain's DMARC policy, and what it actually asks receivers to do
• Reverse DNS Lookup — The PTR record for an address, and whether it confirms itself
• IP Blacklist Checker — Whether an address is on the blocklists that actually stop mail
• Reverse IP Lookup — What an address says about itself: its name, its certificate, its network
• Traceroute — Every hop between this server and a host, with the time each one took
• Broadband Speed Test — Download, upload, latency and jitter, measured from this tab
• HTTP Headers — Grade a site's security headers from A+ to F, see every response header, and get the fix for your server
• Redirect Checker — Follow a URL's redirects hop by hop, and flag loops, downgrades and temporary redirects doing a permanent job
• IP Address Converter — Write an IPv4 or IPv6 address as an integer, hex, binary, expanded or mapped form, and see what kind it is
• MAC Address Lookup — Find the manufacturer behind a MAC address, and see what kind of address it is
• MAC to IP Converter — Build the IPv6 address a MAC forms with SLAAC, recover the MAC from one, or find a MAC's IP in an ARP table
• IP to MAC Lookup — Find the MAC address behind an IP: computed for multicast and EUI-64 addresses, or read from an ARP table
• DNSSEC Checker — Whether a domain's DNSSEC validates, and if not, whether it is the DS, a key, an algorithm or an expired signature