What Is My IP: How It Works
Your public IP address is how the internet finds you: every server you connect to sees it, because responses have to be routed back somewhere. This page shows what yours is and, more usefully, what it does and does not reveal about you.
Public and private addresses
| Public | Private | |
|---|---|---|
| Example | 203.0.113.45 | 192.168.1.12 |
| Assigned by | Your ISP | Your router |
| Visible to | Every site you visit | Only your local network |
| Unique? | Globally, at a moment in time | Only within your network |
Private ranges — 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, and 172.16–31.x.x — are reserved and never routable on the public internet. Your router translates between them, which is why every device in your home shares one public address.
What it reveals
| Visible | Not visible |
|---|---|
| Your ISP or hosting provider | Your name or identity |
| Approximate region, often just the country | Your street address |
| Whether you appear to use a VPN or proxy | Your browsing on other sites |
| IPv4 or IPv6 | Files or data on your device |
City-level location is right roughly half to three-quarters of the time, and can be wrong by hundreds of kilometres — particularly on mobile networks, where traffic exits through a small number of regional gateways. Only your ISP can link an address to an account, and in most jurisdictions they require legal process to disclose it.
Static or dynamic
Most home connections receive a dynamic address that changes periodically, at reconnection, or when the lease expires. Businesses often pay for a static address because hosting a server or configuring a firewall allowlist requires one. If yours changes when you restart the router, it is dynamic.
IPv4 and IPv6
IPv4 provides about 4.3 billion addresses and was exhausted years ago, which is why carrier-grade NAT now places many subscribers behind a single public address. IPv6 provides 340 undecillion, enough that every device can have its own. If you see both, your connection is dual-stack and uses whichever the destination supports.
One consequence worth knowing: because IPv6 gives devices individually unique addresses, it removes the incidental privacy that address sharing provided. Privacy extensions, which rotate the device portion of the address, exist for exactly this reason and are enabled by default on most systems.
What a VPN changes
A VPN replaces your visible address with the provider's, so sites see the provider's location rather than yours, and your ISP sees encrypted traffic to the provider rather than your destinations. What it does not do is make you anonymous: the VPN provider can see everything your ISP previously could, cookies and logins still identify you, and browser fingerprinting works regardless of address. Using one moves your trust from the ISP to the VPN company — a real change, but a change of who, not an elimination.