What this tool shows
- Your public IP address, the one every website sees when you visit, and whether it is IPv4 or IPv6.
- Location: country, region and city, from a local IP database.
- Network: the provider or company the address belongs to.
- Reverse DNS: the hostname set for the address, when there is one.
- Flags: whether the address belongs to a hosting company or datacenter, is a known proxy, or is on a threat list.
- Your browser: the browser, operating system and device type your user agent reports.
Enter any other public IP to look it up the same way.
Public and private IP addresses
Your computer or phone also has a private address on your home or office network, like 192.168.1.20. Websites never see it. Your router shares one public address between every device behind it, and that public address is what this page shows.
Private ranges (10.x, 172.16.x to 172.31.x, 192.168.x) and reserved ones can't be looked up, because they mean something different on every network.
How IP location works
IP location databases map blocks of addresses to the places their owners use them. They are built from provider records, routing data and measurements, and they are updated often.
- Country is right almost every time.
- City is often right for home broadband and less often for mobile networks, which can route traffic through a hub in another city.
- VPNs and proxies show the location of the VPN server, not you.
No IP database knows a street address. Only your provider can link an address to a customer.
Why websites care about IP addresses
- Analytics use the IP to work out a visitor's country and city, then drop it. A privacy-first tool never stores the address itself.
- Firewalls block addresses on threat lists and traffic from datacenters, where most bots and scrapers run.
- Bot checks compare an IP with the ranges a company publishes, which is how you tell a real Googlebot from a fake one. Try the bot verifier.
Datacenter and proxy addresses
Real people almost always browse from home, mobile or office networks. A request from a cloud provider like AWS, Google Cloud or DigitalOcean is usually a script, a crawler or someone hiding behind a VPN. That doesn't make it bad (search engine crawlers come from datacenters too), but it is a strong hint.
The NoirTrack firewall uses the same signals to block datacenter traffic, known bad IPs and fake crawlers before they reach your pages.