Domains and DNS

What does my IP address reveal about me?

IP geolocation is simultaneously less precise than people fear and more revealing than they expect. The gap between those two is worth understanding exactly.

Any site you visit sees your public IP address, and from it can look up the organisation that owns the address block, the autonomous system number, and an estimated location that is typically accurate to the city or region and frequently wrong by a hundred kilometres or more. It cannot look up your name, your street address, your phone number or your identity. Your internet provider holds the record connecting that address to your account at a given moment, and discloses it only on a legal request.

Worked out 2026-09-11 (IST) · public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses as seen by an ordinary web server

What is knowable, and how reliably

Inference from an IP address
Signal	How it is obtained	Reliability
Owning organisation / ISP	Regional internet registry allocation records	Very high — this is authoritative data
Autonomous system (ASN)	Public BGP routing data	Very high
Country	Registry allocation plus commercial databases	High, around 95–99%
Region or state	Commercial geolocation databases	Moderate
City	Commercial geolocation databases	Low to moderate; often wrong
Street address	—	Not available. Any tool claiming it is guessing.
Connection type (home, mobile, datacentre)	Block classification	High — datacentre ranges are well known
Whether you are on a VPN or proxy	Known hosting and VPN ranges	Moderate to high for commercial VPNs
Your name or identity	—	Not available from the address alone

What every site already sees, IP aside

Focusing on the IP address overstates its importance. An ordinary page load hands over a good deal more, none of it requiring any special effort by the site:

Sent with every request
Data	Source	What it gives away
User-Agent	HTTP header	Browser, version, operating system
Accept-Language	HTTP header	Your language preferences, often your country
Referer	HTTP header	The page you came from
Cookies	Previous visits	A stable identity across sessions — far stronger than an IP
Screen size, timezone, fonts	JavaScript	A fingerprint that survives IP changes
IP address	The connection itself	Network, approximate area, connection type

What IPv6 changes

An IPv6 address is longer and structured differently: the first half identifies the network your provider assigned you, the second half identifies the device. Left alone, that device half could be derived from the hardware address and would follow you between networks, so operating systems implement privacy extensions that rotate it, typically daily. The network half does not rotate, so an IPv6 address still identifies your connection about as precisely as an IPv4 one — occasionally more, because IPv6 blocks are allocated more finely and are less likely to be shared behind carrier-grade NAT.

Sources: regional internet registry (APNIC, ARIN, RIPE NCC) allocation data; public BGP routing tables; IETF RFC 4941 (IPv6 privacy extensions) and RFC 6598 (carrier-grade NAT address space).

Check your own numbers

See your own public address and exactly what a server can infer from it.

What Is My IPYour public IP address, and what a server can infer from it.

Frequently asked

Can someone find my home address from my IP?

No. The databases that power IP geolocation map address blocks to areas, not to households, and the coordinates they return for a residential connection are usually the centre of a city or the location of the ISP equipment. Where a street-level answer appears, it is the provider's facility, not yours. The only party that can connect an IP to a subscriber is the ISP, and it requires legal process.

Why does a website think I am in a different city?

Because geolocation is inference, not measurement. Your ISP may route your traffic through equipment in a larger city; the address block may have been reassigned between regions and the databases not updated; mobile networks commonly present addresses registered to a national gateway. On a mobile connection especially, being placed in a city you have never visited is ordinary.

Does a VPN completely hide my IP?

It replaces the address that sites see with the VPN server's, which genuinely removes the ISP and location inference. It does not make you anonymous: cookies, browser fingerprints and being signed in identify you far more reliably than an IP ever did, and the VPN provider itself now sees everything your ISP used to. You have changed who knows, not whether anyone knows.

Does my IP address change?

For most home connections, yes - providers assign addresses dynamically and they change on reconnection or on a lease renewal, though in practice many stay the same for weeks. Mobile addresses change constantly. Business connections often pay for a static address precisely because it does not change. IPv6 adds a wrinkle: privacy extensions rotate the host part of your address regularly while the network prefix stays put.

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