Built and tested by Pavel Ahmed · Last updated October 5, 2026

What Is My IP Address and What Does This Tool Show?

An IP address is a number that lets other computers send data back to you. Every website you open records the address your connection presents, because without it the reply would have nowhere to go. This tool reads that address for you and shows the details registered against it, so you see roughly what a website sees.

Public IP vs private IP

The address shown here is your public IP address: the one the outside internet sees. It is not the address you see in your router or phone settings. Those start with ranges such as 192.168., 10. or 172.16. to 172.31., which are reserved for private networks under RFC 1918 and are never visible online. Many homes share one public address across every device in the house.

What you get in one check

• Your public IPv4 address, shown large and ready to copy.

• Your IPv6 address, if your connection has one.

• Location fields: country, region, city, ZIP and time zone.

• Network fields: internet provider, organisation, AS number and AS name.

• Your user agent, the text your browser announces about itself.

Who uses it

Most people arrive with one of three needs: a support desk asked for their IP, they want to confirm a VPN is working, or they are curious why a site treats them as if they were in another country. Site owners and moderators also use it to sanity-check an address from their logs, and remote workers use it to see whether a laptop exits through the office or through home broadband.

How Do You Check Your IP Address Here?

1. Open the page and wait a moment. Your address is looked up automatically, with no button to press.

2. Click the large number to copy it. A short confirmation appears at the bottom of the screen. You can also focus it with the keyboard and press Enter.

3. Read the table. Your IPv4 and IPv6 rows come first, then the location rows, then the network rows.

4. Compare before and after. To test a VPN, note the operator and country first, switch the VPN on, and reload the page. A working tunnel changes the address, the provider and usually the country.

What Does Each Row in the Results Mean?

Every row comes straight from the lookup response, in a fixed order, so the same address always produces the same table.

ISP vs organisation

On a home line both usually name the same provider. On a rented server or a VPN exit they often differ: the organisation is the brand leasing the range, and the ISP is the larger company underneath it. Both are shown because either half can be the useful one.

AS number

The Autonomous System number is the permanent identifier of the network that announces your address to the rest of the internet, defined in RFC 1930. Company names change, AS numbers rarely do, so quote the AS number in an abuse report or a support ticket.

User agent

This row is not part of your IP data. It is read from your browser on your own device and shown so you can copy it alongside your address. To see how sites read it, use the user agent checker.

How Accurate Is IP Location?

Country is usually right. City is an estimate. That gap surprises people, but it follows from how the data is built: location databases infer position from registration records, routing data and measurements, not from any signal that comes from your device.

Location data providers say the same about their own products. MaxMind, one of the best-known suppliers, states that it cannot guarantee full accuracy and that its data is never precise enough to identify a specific household or street address (see MaxMind's geolocation accuracy page). It also publishes a city accuracy comparison by country, which shows how much the results vary from one place to another.

Mobile connections are the biggest source of error. A carrier may route thousands of subscribers through one gateway (the shared address space used for this is described in RFC 6598), so the address can map to a city you have never visited. If you need details on any other address, the IP lookup returns registration and location for whatever you type in.

How Does This Page Fetch Your Address?

The page asks in a fixed order and stops at the first answer that arrives intact. The large display always prefers IPv4 and never falls back to IPv6.

Step 1: the main lookup

One request goes to ip.myipshow.com with caching disabled, credentials omitted and a six-second timeout. Disabling the cache matters, because a cached reply would show an address you no longer have, which is exactly the failure people come here to rule out.

Step 2: picking a strict IPv4

The response can carry the address under more than one key, so the page checks each in a set order. Every candidate must match a strict dotted-decimal pattern, so an IPv6 string can never end up in the IPv4 slot.

Step 3: fallbacks, only when needed

If the main lookup returned no IPv4, a plain-text IPv4 echo service is tried next. If it still fails, the display reads IPv4 not available. If the main lookup returned thin location or provider details, a backup geolocation service is asked about your IPv4 to fill the gaps. These two fallbacks are third-party services and are contacted only in those cases.

Step 4: filling the table

The table fills both address rows separately. That is why the large display and the table can differ: the display is IPv4-only by design, while the table reports each family as it is. Nothing is saved between visits and there is no history list.

IPv4 or IPv6: Which One Do You Have?

IPv4 is the older 32-bit format, written as four numbers such as 203.0.113.25 and defined in RFC 791. Its space of roughly 4.3 billion addresses ran short, so IPv6 arrived with a 128-bit format, defined in RFC 8200, written in hexadecimal groups separated by colons. Most connections today run both at once.

For a full comparison and how to tell which family matters for your setup, read IPv4 vs IPv6: what's the difference and which one do you have?. To understand why the number changes over time, see static vs dynamic IP addresses.

When Would You Check Your IP Address?

What Does an IP Address Reveal About You?

An IP address identifies a connection, not a person. The public registry can tell you which network announces the address, roughly where that network registered it, and who to contact about abuse. It cannot say who was using the connection at any moment, and only your provider can link an address to a subscriber, through legal process.

Addresses also change more than people expect. Home connections sit on a lease that renews, mobile networks reassign from a shared pool, and VPN apps rotate exits between sessions. A result from last week may describe a connection that no longer exists in that form.

For a deeper look at what an address exposes, read what your IP address reveals about you and whether someone can find your home address from it. If you want to reduce what a site can see, how to hide your IP address compares five real methods.

What Other Tools Work With This One?

Sources and Further Reading

The definitions on this page follow the standards below. For location accuracy, the reference is a location data provider's own published limits.

• RFC 791: the IPv4 specification.

• RFC 8200: the IPv6 specification.

• RFC 1918: address allocation for private networks.

• RFC 6598: the shared address space used for carrier-grade NAT.

• RFC 1930: guidelines for creating and registering an Autonomous System.

• RFC 5737: IPv4 address blocks reserved for documentation, used for the examples above.

• MaxMind: geolocation accuracy: the limits of IP geolocation, from a major data provider.

• MaxMind: GeoIP accuracy comparison: city-level accuracy by country.

Frequently Asked Questions