What Is My IP?

What is my IP address, and what does this page show?

The answer to what is my IP address is the public address of your current connection. It is the number your provider assigns and every website you visit sees. This page does not guess it; it prints the source address our server sees on your connection. Next to it, the tool adds what your browser reports about itself:

• IP and version: an IPv4 or IPv6 badge plus the address type (public, private, shared).
• Device info: browser and version, operating system, device type, screen and window size.
• Language and time zone: your browser language and your time zone with its UTC offset.
• Two checks: a VPN test and a comparison with an IP or a range.

I open this page most often when my team and I set up tracking on client sites. During Google Ads management, the office IP goes into the exclusion list and into the GA4 internal traffic rule. If you enter the wrong address, your own clicks eat into the budget. Moreover, the tool never writes your IP to a database, never sends it to another service and never puts it into the share link.

What is the difference between a public and a local IP?

Your home router goes online with a single public IP. Your phone, laptop and TV, in turn, receive local IP addresses such as 192.168.1.24 from the router. When traffic leaves the house, the router hides those internal addresses behind its own public one; this process is called NAT. That is why every device in the same home sees the same IP on this page.

No website can see your local IP, because that address never leaves the router. Only the device itself knows it. The tool therefore detects your system and shows the right settings path in the box under the panel. In practice, the two addresses matter for different jobs:

• Public IP: allow lists, ad and analytics filters, remote access.
• Local IP: printer setup, the router admin page, file sharing at home.

There is also a third case. Some providers, especially on mobile networks, put many subscribers behind a shared (CGNAT) network. In that case you share the public IP you see with other customers. As a result, direct connections from outside and port forwarding usually fail.

Dynamic or static IP: which one do you have?

Most home and mobile connections use a dynamic IP: the provider hands out addresses from a shared pool. It may change yours when the router reconnects or at intervals. A static IP, on the other hand, is reserved for you and stays the same until you change your plan. For everyday browsing a dynamic IP is enough; in addition, not being tied to one address for years is a small privacy plus.

A static IP makes life easier in these cases:

• You want to reach an office server or a security camera remotely.
• Your hosting panel, database or a company app only allows certain IPs.
• You want to keep office traffic out of GA4 and Google Ads permanently.

Providers usually sell static IPs with business plans or for an extra fee, so ask yours about price and terms. If you stay on a dynamic IP, open this page once a month and paste the address from your lists into the comparison box. If the address has changed, the tool flags it right away with the Different badge.

What is the difference between IPv4 and IPv6?

An IPv4 address has 32 bits and four parts, such as 85.105.12.34. That gives 2^32, roughly 4.3 billion addresses, which was never going to be enough for today's internet. RIPE NCC serves Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. On 25 November 2019 it announced that it had run out of IPv4 addresses. IPv6 is the answer to that shortage: 128 bit addresses written as eight groups separated by colons, with practically unlimited space.

Many connections today use both versions at once (dual stack). If your browser can reach a site over IPv6, it usually prefers it; otherwise it falls back to IPv4. So seeing IPv6 at home and IPv4 on another network is perfectly normal. If you want to check your line's IPv6 support in detail, the IPv6 test measures it separately.

IPv6 has two shortening rules: you may drop leading zeros in each group, and you may replace one run of zero groups with ::. RFC 5952 recommends lower case and shortening the longest run of zeros. The comparison box expands both notations in full; in other words, 2001:db8::1 and 2001:0DB8:0:0:0:0:0:1 give the same result.

How do a VPN, iCloud Private Relay and a proxy change my IP address?

All three route your traffic through another server, so the site sees that server's address instead of yours. The difference lies in what they cover:

• VPN: usually tunnels all traffic from the device. Some apps use split tunneling to leave certain sites outside the tunnel.
• iCloud Private Relay: Apple's service sends Safari traffic through two separate relays. Sites see a relay address instead of your real IP, which by default keeps your approximate region.
• Proxy: often covers only the browser or a single app.

That is why the VPN test in the tool takes two readings. It takes the first reading when the page opens. Then, when you switch the VPN on and press the button, it reads the current address without reloading the page. If the address changed, your traffic now leaves through a different exit point.

Let me be clear about one limit: this test only measures the IP this site sees. It does not check whether your DNS queries bypass the VPN or whether an address leaks through WebRTC. Your time zone is another clue; for example, if the VPN places you in Germany while your browser still reports America/New_York, sites can notice the mismatch.

How do you exclude your own visits in GA4 and Google Ads?

Your team's visits inflate reports, and their ad clicks waste budget. You can separate them by IP address in two places. In both, the correct address is the public IP you see on this page:

1. GA4 internal traffic: go to Admin, Data collection and modification, Data streams, your web stream, Configure tag settings, Show more, then Define internal traffic. The rule accepts equals, begins with, ends with, contains and is in range (CIDR). After that, set the data filter to Testing first and then to Active; according to Google, a filter can take 24 to 36 hours to apply.
2. Google Ads IP exclusions: in the campaign settings you can enter up to 500 IP addresses per campaign. To exclude a block, replace the last part with an asterisk. Some campaign types, Performance Max among them, lack the campaign level option; use account level IP exclusions there.

Switch off your VPN before you add anything, then confirm the address with the comparison box. I explain how to read your reports after filtering in website traffic analysis tools for business websites.

Is an IP address personal data, and what do websites do with it?

Every site you visit sees your IP address, because a connection cannot work any other way. Sites typically use it for these jobs:

• Choosing a language or country and showing regional prices or content.
• Filtering suspicious logins and bot traffic, and applying rate limits.
• Estimating an approximate location in ad and analytics tools.

The legal side matters too. In the 2016 Breyer judgment, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that a dynamic IP address can be personal data. That applies when the website operator has legal means to identify the person with extra information held by the provider. Therefore, under the GDPR I recommend that any site processing IP addresses says so clearly in its privacy notice. I cover the details in how to build a GDPR compliant website; for critical decisions, check current law and ask your legal adviser.

If you want to know which provider and roughly which region an IP belongs to, try the IP lookup tool. This page, by contrast, never sends your IP to any outside service for a lookup.