IP Address Lookup
Enter any public IPv4 or IPv6 address to find its location, ISP, and network details.
What can an IP lookup tell you?
An IP lookup queries public geolocation and routing databases to reveal where an address is registered: the country, region and city, the internet provider or hosting company that owns it, and its ASN (autonomous system number). It cannot reveal a person's name, street address, or browsing history. Browsing activity isn't visible from an IP lookup at all — it may be seen by the sites you visit, your browser, your employer or network, and your DNS or VPN provider, depending on the setup.
Common uses: checking where a suspicious login attempt came from, verifying a server's location, investigating spam email headers, or confirming your VPN exit location.
How accurate is IP geolocation?
Country-level accuracy is high — typically well above 95% — because address blocks are allocated to organizations per region and that mapping is public. City-level accuracy is much weaker and varies enormously by connection type:
| Fixed home broadband | Usually correct to the city or metro area. Providers allocate blocks regionally and those allocations change slowly. |
| Mobile networks | Frequently wrong by hundreds of kilometres. Carriers route large regions through a handful of gateways, so your address often reflects the gateway city, not yours. |
| Business connections | Often show the company's registered headquarters rather than the branch you are sitting in. |
| VPNs and proxies | Show the exit server's location by design. |
| Satellite and CGNAT | Frequently show the operator's aggregation point, which can be in another country entirely. |
Geolocation is inference from registration and routing data — not GPS, and never precise to a street. If your own result looks wrong, that is common and fixable: see why your IP address shows the wrong location.
What an IP lookup cannot reveal
- Not a name or street address. Only the ISP holds the subscriber record linking an address to a person, and normally releases it only under legal process.
- Not browsing history. Nothing about which sites an address visited is in any public database.
- Not a single device. With carrier-grade NAT, one public IPv4 address can represent hundreds or thousands of subscribers simultaneously.
- Not permanent. Most consumer addresses are dynamic and reassigned; a lookup describes the address now, not who used it last week. See static vs dynamic IP addresses.
Reading the results
| Country / region / city | Registration and routing-derived location. Trust the country, treat the city as approximate. |
| ISP / organization | The network operator. A hosting company here usually means a server, VPN, or proxy rather than a home connection. |
| ASN | The autonomous system announcing the address — the most reliable field, since it comes from routing rather than estimation. Dig deeper with the ASN lookup. |
| Timezone | Derived from the estimated location, so it inherits the same uncertainty. |
| Coordinates | The centre of the estimated area, not a device position. A rural lookup often returns a regional or national centroid. |
Looking up an IP address from the command line
curl checkpublicip.com/api/json — your own address and network details as
JSON.
dig -x 8.8.8.8 +short — the hostname behind an address; see the
reverse DNS lookup.
whois 8.8.8.8 — the registry record and abuse contact for the address block.
Related tools
Identify the network operator with the ASN lookup, find the hostname with the reverse DNS lookup, check whether an address belongs to a VPN or datacenter with the VPN test, or see your own IP address first.