IP Address Lookup

An IP address reliably identifies the network a device is connected to — not the device or the person using it. A lookup typically returns the country, region and approximate city, the internet service provider or hosting company that owns the address block, the organisation it is registered to, the autonomous system (AS) number, and the local timezone.

It does not reveal a name, street address, phone number, email, browsing history, or anything stored on the device. Those details exist only in the ISP's own subscriber records, which are not public and are normally released only under a court order.

If you are starting from a domain name rather than an address, the two are tracked in separate registries: use the whois domain lookup for registrar and expiry details, or the DNS record lookup to find which addresses a domain currently points to.

Accuracy drops sharply as the area gets smaller:

• Country: highly reliable — typically correct around 95–99% of the time.
• Region or state: usually right, but noticeably less dependable.
• City: roughly right more often than not, and frequently off by tens of kilometres.
• Street address: not possible. Any service claiming this is guessing.

The coordinates returned are the centre of an estimated area, not a pinpoint. When a provider can only narrow an address to a country, it often returns that country's geographic centre — which is why lookups sometimes land in the middle of a field or a lake.

This is common and usually harmless. The most frequent causes:

• Your ISP routes traffic through a regional hub, so you appear in the nearest large city rather than your town.
• You are on mobile data — carrier-grade NAT can place you in an entirely different city or state.
• A VPN, proxy or corporate network is in use, showing that server's location instead.
• The address block was recently reassigned and the geolocation databases have not caught up. This lag can run to months.

If the country is wrong too, a VPN or proxy is almost always the explanation.

No. A public lookup like this one narrows an address to a city or region at best. The mapping from an IP address to a physical service address exists only inside your ISP's systems.

Law enforcement can compel an ISP to disclose that record with a warrant or subpoena. A member of the public cannot. Sites and messages claiming to reveal someone's exact address from an IP are scams.

Your public IP is assigned by your ISP and is what the rest of the internet sees — that is the address shown at the top of this page and the one you can look up here.

A private IP (such as 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x or 172.16–31.x.x) is assigned by your own router to each device on your network. These ranges are reserved for internal use, are not routable on the public internet, and return no useful geolocation data — every home network in the world reuses the same ranges.

IPv4 addresses look like 203.0.113.42 — four numbers, about 4.3 billion possible addresses. That pool ran out, which is why ISPs increasingly share one public IPv4 address across many customers.

IPv6 addresses look like 2001:0db8:85a3::8a2e:0370:7334 and provide an effectively unlimited pool. Both are supported by this tool. Geolocation for IPv6 is generally somewhat less mature than for IPv4, since the address blocks are newer and less thoroughly mapped.

Yes — completely. With a VPN active, every site you visit (including this one) sees the VPN server's IP address and location, not yours. That is the entire purpose of a VPN.

Lookups on such addresses usually show a hosting or data-centre provider as the owner rather than a consumer ISP, which is the clearest signal that an address belongs to a VPN, proxy or cloud server rather than a home connection.

Most home connections use a dynamic IP address: the ISP leases you one from a pool and it can change when your router restarts, when the lease expires, or during network maintenance. This is normal and costs you nothing.

A static IP address stays fixed and is usually a paid add-on, mainly useful if you host a server, need consistent remote access, or must whitelist your address with a service.

Your address also changes whenever you switch networks — home Wi-Fi, mobile data and a café hotspot each give you a different one.

Yes. IP address registration data is published deliberately by the regional internet registries so that network operators can identify who is responsible for an address block and contact them about routing problems or abuse. Querying it is a routine, legitimate part of running a network.

What you do with the information is still governed by ordinary law — harassment, stalking and unauthorised access are illegal regardless of how the address was obtained.

No. Lookups are performed in real time and results are held in a short-lived cache for one hour purely to keep repeat queries fast, then deleted automatically. We do not keep a log tying searches to visitors.