Your public IP and what sites can see about you.
Your public IP address is the one your router, your mobile carrier or your VPN presents to the internet. Every site you visit sees it: it is needed to send pages back to you. From it, a geolocation service can infer:
| Information | Reliability |
|---|---|
| Country | Very good, except behind a VPN or relay. |
| Region and city | Approximate: often the city where your provider installed its equipment, sometimes tens of kilometres from you. |
| Postcode | Indicative, rarely exact. |
| Provider | Reliable: it is the organisation the address block was allocated to. |
| Time zone | Inferred from the location, so just as approximate. |
Your street address, name or phone number never appear. Only your internet provider knows which subscriber an address belongs to at a given moment, and it only discloses it to the authorities, under a legal order.
An IPv4 address is written as four numbers, like 203.0.113.42. There are about 4.3 billion of them, far fewer than connected devices, so providers often share one address between several customers, which is called CGNAT. An IPv6 address is much longer, like 2001:db8:85a3::8a2e:370:7334, and each household gets a whole block. Your connection may have both: the tool shows the one used to reach the service.
At home, each device also has a private address, assigned by the router: 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, or 172.16.x.x to 172.31.x.x. These addresses never go out onto the internet and only serve the local network. That is why the address shown here differs from the one in your computer's settings.
Many providers assign an address that can change, when the router restarts or at regular intervals. Others, especially on fibre, provide a fixed IPv4. A fixed address is useful to host a service at home or to be recognised by an allow list. In IPv6, the part specific to each device often changes by itself, to limit tracking.
Geolocation databases are built from providers' declarations and measurements: they are wrong fairly often, especially on mobile, where all the traffic of a region can exit through a single city. A VPN, a private relay such as iCloud's, or a corporate network also move your apparent location. If a site refuses you content because of a wrong location, it is that site's database that needs correcting, not your connection.
The lookup is done by the ipapi.co service, directly from your browser: the result does not pass through NetCheck and is not stored.
Your public IP is the address the rest of the internet sees when you connect. It belongs to your router or your mobile connection, not to one device: every phone, laptop and console on the same home Wi-Fi shares it. The address at the top of this page is that public IP, ready to copy.
The local, private address of each device is a different thing, and the NetCheck guide on this page explains it under public and private addresses. The quick rule: if your address starts with 192.168. or 10., you are looking at a local address, not your public IP.
| What appears | What it means |
|---|---|
Four numbers, like 203.0.113.42 | Your public IPv4 address |
A long address with colons, like 2001:db8::42 | Your public IPv6 address: your connection supports it and used it here |
The tool shows one address: the one your connection used to reach the lookup service. A dual-stack connection has both, and the IPv6 one is usually preferred. If a support team or an allow list asks for your IPv4, open the page on a network without IPv6, such as some mobile connections, or check the WAN address in your router's settings.
Need an address that never changes? Ask your provider for a static IP.
No. IP geolocation gives a city at best, often that of your provider's connection point. Only the provider can link an address to a subscriber, and it only does so at the request of the courts.
Your provider probably assigns a dynamic address, renewed when the router restarts or periodically. On mobile, it changes very often. In IPv6, the device-specific suffix is deliberately renewed to make tracking harder.
It replaces your address with the VPN server's in the eyes of the sites you visit, which then see the VPN's country and provider. Your internet provider still sees that you are connected to a VPN, and the VPN provider sees your real address: you are trusting them.
Your connection has both, and the service was reached over IPv6, which is preferred when available. Both addresses identify you in the same way to websites.
On the same home Wi-Fi, yes for IPv4: all devices go out through the router's single public address. In IPv6, each device usually has its own public address within your household's block.
Your computer shows its private address on the local network, given by the router. This page shows the public address your router presents to the internet. Both are correct, they just serve different networks.
Sharing it with a support team or for an allow list is common and fine. It reveals your provider and an approximate city, not your name or street address. Avoid posting it publicly, as it can attract unwanted connection attempts.
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