My IP Address
Your public address, and what it reveals
The IP address servers see when you connect, its reverse DNS, approximate location, network operator, and the headers your browser sends.
My IP Address
Sends requests through this site’s server01 — How to use My IP Address
02 — Getting good results
03 — Questions
Because a page cannot see its own public address. The browser knows only the private address of the network interface; the public one is assigned by your provider and is visible only to whatever you connect to. Asking a server what address the request arrived from is the only way to find out.
No. It is read from the request, used for the lookup, and discarded. It is held briefly in memory to keep repeat lookups from exhausting the geolocation provider’s free tier, and that cache expires within minutes.
Yes, and this is the one place on this site where that happens. The geolocation database is queried by this site’s server over HTTPS, so your browser never contacts it directly, but the address does reach that provider. If the lookup fails or is unavailable, the address is still reported and the rest is simply omitted.
Not here — the data belongs to the geolocation provider. Most maintain a correction form for exactly this, and errors are common enough that they expect the traffic. A wrong result usually means the block was reallocated or is routed from elsewhere.
04 — More about My IP Address
Why a browser cannot see its own address
A device on a typical network holds a private address, drawn from ranges reserved for internal use and meaningless outside it. When it sends traffic to the internet, the router rewrites the source address to the network’s single public one and remembers the mapping so replies find their way back. This is network address translation, and it is what allows billions of devices to share a pool of addresses that ran out years ago. The consequence is that your browser genuinely does not know your public address: the translation happens after the packet leaves it. The only way to learn the address is to ask something on the other side of the translation what it saw.
What an address actually reveals
Addresses are allocated in blocks to regional registries, then to providers, then to customers. Public records say which organisation holds a block, and commercial databases add observed routing to guess at geography. The result is reliable about the operator and rough about location. It reveals the provider, often the type of connection, the approximate area, and — over time and combined with other signals — a good deal more than that suggests. What it does not reveal is an identity: mapping an address to a person requires records held by the provider, which is why legal processes exist to obtain them.
IPv4, IPv6, and why you may have both
The original address space allows about four billion addresses, which were exhausted in the 2010s. IPv6 expands this to a number with thirty-nine digits, enough that every device can hold a globally unique address and translation becomes unnecessary. Adoption has been gradual, so most connections now run both, choosing per destination. This has a privacy consequence worth knowing: an IPv4 address is usually shared by a whole household and changes periodically, while an IPv6 address is frequently specific to one device. Modern systems mitigate this by rotating temporary addresses, but the default assumption that an address identifies a network rather than a machine is weaker than it used to be.
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