IP Address Lookup

What is my IP address?

Your IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique numerical label assigned to every device that connects to a computer network. When you connect to the internet through your ISP (Internet Service Provider), your router is assigned a public IP address that identifies your network on the broader internet.

Think of your IP address as the return address on an envelope: every time your browser loads a web page, that request includes your IP address so the server knows where to send the response. Every website you visit, every API call you make, and every email you send discloses your IP address to the receiving server.

The IP shown above is your public IP address — the one your ISP has assigned to your internet connection. This is different from your private (local) IP address (usually 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x), which identifies your specific device within your home or office network but is invisible to external servers.

Your public IP may be dynamic or static:

• Dynamic IP: Changes periodically (typically when you restart your router or after your ISP's DHCP lease expires). Most residential connections use dynamic IPs.
• Static IP: Permanently assigned and never changes. Used by servers, businesses, and developers hosting services. Usually costs extra from ISPs.

IPv4 vs IPv6: what is the difference?

IP addresses come in two formats, and your connection may be using either or both simultaneously.

IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) uses 32-bit addresses written as four groups of numbers (0–255) separated by dots — for example, 203.0.113.45. IPv4 has been the dominant scheme since 1981 and supports approximately 4.3 billion unique addresses. IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) distributed its final unallocated IPv4 blocks in 2011, making address exhaustion a real constraint for the growing internet.

IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) uses 128-bit addresses written as eight groups of hexadecimal digits — for example, 2001:0db8:85a3::8a2e:0370:7334. IPv6 provides 3.4 × 10³⁸ possible addresses — effectively unlimited for any foreseeable future. It also improves routing efficiency, includes built-in IPsec support, and eliminates the need for NAT (Network Address Translation).

The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is ongoing. Most modern devices and ISPs support dual-stack networking, where both protocols are active simultaneously. If the IP shown by this tool contains colons, your connection is currently routing via IPv6. Google reports over 45% of global users reaching their services via IPv6 as of 2024.

What can someone do with your IP address?

Your IP address reveals less than most people fear, but more than many realize. Here is a precise breakdown:

What an IP address CAN reveal:

• Country: Highly accurate (99%+ reliability). Geolocation databases correctly identify country in nearly all cases.
• Region and approximate city: Moderately accurate (60–80% at city level). The city shown may reflect your ISP's routing node rather than your precise location.
• ISP and network organization: Very accurate. ISP and ASN registration data is publicly available.
• Connection type: Whether the IP is residential, mobile, business, hosting/datacenter, or a known VPN/proxy exit node.

What an IP address CANNOT reveal:

• Your exact street address or GPS coordinates
• Your name, email address, or any personal details
• Which specific person in a household is online
• The content of your browsing (only the destination IP, not what you send)
• Your MAC address or device hardware information

The biggest practical risk from IP exposure is targeted DDoS attacks — mainly relevant for streamers, competitive gamers, or anyone who provokes bad actors online. For ordinary users, IP disclosure is largely harmless unless combined with other identifying information from data breaches or social engineering.

How to hide your IP address

There are three main technologies used to mask or change your visible IP address:

• VPN (Virtual Private Network):Routes all your traffic through a server operated by the VPN provider. The destination sees the VPN server's IP instead of yours. VPNs also encrypt traffic, preventing ISP-level monitoring. Quality matters significantly — reputable providers (Mullvad, ProtonVPN, NordVPN) publish audited no-log policies; free VPNs frequently sell user data. Use the WebRTC Leak Test above to verify your VPN is not leaking your real IP through browser-level channels.
• Proxy: Routes specific application traffic (typically HTTP/HTTPS) through an intermediary server. Unlike VPNs, most proxies do not encrypt traffic and only cover one application at a time. SOCKS5 proxies are more flexible and support any TCP traffic. Suitable for geolocation bypass but not for security-sensitive use cases where encryption matters.
• Tor (The Onion Router): Routes traffic through three volunteer-operated relay nodes, with each hop knowing only the previous and next node — not the full path. This provides strong anonymity but is significantly slower than VPNs. Tor exit nodes are frequently blocked by major services and flagged as high-risk by geolocation databases. The Tor Browser is the standard client.

What is an ISP and what is an ASN?

ISP (Internet Service Provider) is the company that provides your internet connection — Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, BT, Virgin Media, Reliance Jio, Airtel, Telstra. Your ISP owns or leases a block of IP addresses from a regional internet registry and allocates addresses to its customers via DHCP. The ISP name shown in this tool comes directly from the public WHOIS registration for that IP block.

ASN (Autonomous System Number) is a globally unique identifier assigned to a network operated by a single organization under a unified routing policy. Every ISP, large enterprise, cloud provider, and content delivery network has one or more ASNs. Examples: Google operates AS15169, Cloudflare operates AS13335, Amazon AWS operates AS16509. ASNs appear in BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routing tables, which determine how packets are forwarded across the internet. ASN registration is managed by regional internet registries: ARIN (Americas), RIPE NCC (Europe/Middle East/Central Asia), APNIC (Asia-Pacific), LACNIC (Latin America), and AFRINIC (Africa).

IP geolocation: how accurate is it?

IP geolocation maps an IP address to a physical location using several data sources: ISP registration data (highly accurate for country and ISP), Wi-Fi geolocation databases built from location-tagged devices, GPS coordinates submitted from mobile apps, and commercial database providers that aggregate and verify location signals from multiple sources.

IP geolocation is suitable for broad use cases such as serving localized content, country-level fraud screening, and compliance blocking — but not for legally identifying individuals. Courts recognize that an IP address identifies a network connection, not a specific person.

Private vs public IP addresses

Every device on a home or office network has two IP addresses simultaneously:

• Private IP: Your device's address within the local network. RFC 1918 defines three private ranges: 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, and 192.168.0.0/16. These addresses are not routable on the public internet — they never leave your local network. Your router assigns private IPs to connected devices via DHCP.
• Public IP: The single globally-routable IP address your router uses when communicating with the internet — the address this tool displays. A single public IP can serve hundreds of devices through NAT (Network Address Translation). Your router tracks which internal device initiated each connection and routes incoming responses back correctly.

If you enter 192.168.1.1 or 10.0.0.1 into the IP Lookup field, the tool will indicate that it is a private address — no geolocation data is available for RFC 1918 ranges since they are not globally unique.

What is a WebRTC IP leak?

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is a browser API that enables peer-to-peer video calls, screen sharing, and real-time data transfer without plugins. To establish direct peer connections, WebRTC runs an ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment) negotiation process that discovers the real network path between two endpoints — including actual local and public IP addresses.

The critical security implication: WebRTC IP discovery happens at the browser level, bypassing VPN routing. If a website uses JavaScript to initiate a WebRTC data channel, it can extract your real public IP address even when you are connected to a VPN. This is a WebRTC IP leak — one of the most common VPN vulnerabilities.

The WebRTC Leak Test above runs entirely in your browser and checks for this vulnerability. What the test shows:

• No IPs detected: Your browser either does not support WebRTC, has it disabled, or your VPN/browser extension is masking the WebRTC IP — you are not leaking.
• IPs detected that match your VPN IP: WebRTC is active but only reporting the VPN address — no leak.
• IPs detected that differ from your VPN IP: Your real IP is leaking through WebRTC.

To prevent WebRTC leaks: Firefox users can set media.peerconnection.enabled to false in about:config. Chromium-based browser users can install a WebRTC leak prevention extension. Many premium VPN browser extensions block WebRTC automatically.

How does this IP lookup tool work?

When you open the My IP tab, the tool calls a server-side endpoint that detects your public IP from the network connection headers. This is more reliable than client-side detection — especially on corporate networks with complex proxy configurations. The detected IP is then sent to the ipinfo.io geolocation database, which returns the associated city, region, country, ISP, ASN, timezone, and approximate coordinates.

The Lookup Any IP feature works identically but for any IP address you provide. The server validates the input, queries the same database, and returns the results. All processing happens server-side; your queries are not logged by Nutilz. The WebRTC leak test runs entirely client-side in your browser using the browser's built-in WebRTC API — no data is sent to any server for that test.

Frequently asked questions