What is my IP address?

What an IP address actually is

An IP address is the number that identifies your connection on the internet, the way a postal address identifies a building. Every packet you send carries it, because without a return address nothing can come back. That makes it the one identifier you cannot withhold: it lives in the packet header, below the web page, so no browser setting and no cookie banner has any effect on it.

Your internet provider assigns it. On a home connection it is usually shared by every device in the building and changes every few days or weeks. On mobile it is often shared by thousands of subscribers behind carrier-grade NAT. Your provider knows which subscriber held which address at which moment, and that record is what a copyright notice or a court order asks for.

What a website learns from it

• Roughly where you are. Country almost always, city sometimes. This is what drives currency, language and the message that a video is not available in your region.
• Who your provider is. Address blocks are registered to organisations, so the network name comes with the address at no extra effort.
• Whether you are on a datacentre connection. Commercial databases flag ranges belonging to hosting companies, which is how streaming services block most VPN and proxy traffic.
• A stable handle for tracking. Combined with a browser fingerprint, an address that changes weekly is enough to recognise a returning visitor who has cleared every cookie.

IPv4, IPv6, and why the difference matters for a VPN

IPv4 addresses look like 203.0.113.9. There are about 4.3 billion of them and the pool was exhausted years ago. IPv6 addresses look like 2001:db8:85a3::8a2e:370:7334, and there are roughly 3.4x10^38, which is enough for the foreseeable life of the protocol. Google measures IPv6 adoption among its own users at over 45 percent, so most connections now have both kinds of address at once.

That dual-stack reality is where a lot of VPNs quietly fail. If a client tunnels IPv4 and leaves IPv6 alone, every site that supports IPv6 will be reached over the untunnelled address, and the VPN accomplishes nothing for those connections. If the readout above shows an IPv6 address while your VPN is connected to an IPv4 server, that is what is happening.

Why the city is often wrong

IP geolocation is a lookup in a commercial database, not a measurement. The database records where an address block was registered and where its traffic appears to enter the network, which is frequently the operator's regional hub rather than your street. Country-level accuracy is generally reliable. City-level accuracy is a guess that mobile, satellite and business connections routinely defeat by hundreds of kilometres. If the location above is wrong, the database is wrong, and there is nothing on your end to fix.

Changing what sites see

The only way to change the address a server observes is to route your traffic through something else, so that the server sees that thing instead of you. A VPN does this for the whole device, a proxy or browser extension does it for one application, and Tor does it through three hops at a substantial cost in speed.

None of them make you anonymous. Being signed in to an account identifies you regardless of the address, and browser fingerprinting works on properties a VPN never touches. Two of those properties are worth testing directly: whether your domain lookups escape the tunnel, and whether WebRTC hands out your real address anyway.

What this page stores

Nothing. Your address is read from the request headers, written into the response, and discarded when the request ends. There is no database behind this page, no cookie, and no advertising script. The rest of the site is described in the privacy policy.