How to use What Is My IP
What it does & when you need it
This tool shows the public IP address the internet actually uses to reach you —
the one our server sees when your browser makes a request. That is different from
the private address your device holds on your local network (something in the
192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x range) that your router hands out behind NAT. Those
private addresses never leave your home or office; the public one is what a
website, game server, or mail host records as "you."
Unlike most tools on Devtools, this one is not purely client-side and cannot be.
Your browser can't see its own public IP without asking something on the outside,
so your request is sent to our server, which reads the connection's source
address and echoes it back along with your User-Agent and any
X-Forwarded-For header. Be aware of that: the lookup involves a round-trip to
us. We don't store it — but the request does leave your machine, so this is not
one of the "runs entirely in your browser" tools.
Reach for it when you need to whitelist your address for a firewall or database, confirm a VPN is actually routing your traffic, check whether you're on IPv4 or IPv6, or debug why a service thinks you're coming from somewhere unexpected.
How to use
- The page fetches your address automatically on load and shows it in large monospace type, so you can read or copy it at a glance.
- Below it, the user-agent row shows the browser string you sent, and — if present — an x-forwarded-for row shows the proxy chain.
- Click Refresh (or press
Ctrl/Cmd+Enter) to look it up again, for example after toggling a VPN to confirm your exit address changed.
Things worth knowing
IPv4 or IPv6 — you may have both. Many networks now hand out an address of
each family, and which one appears here depends on how the connection was
negotiated. An IPv6 result (with colons, like 2a00:1450::1) is normal on modern
mobile and fibre networks; it doesn't mean anything is misconfigured.
Behind a proxy, CDN, or VPN, this is the exit node's IP, not yours. If your
traffic passes through a VPN or a corporate proxy, the address shown is that
service's, which is exactly what you want when verifying a VPN. When a chain of
hops is involved, the X-Forwarded-For header lists the addresses a request
claims to have travelled through. Treat it as a hint, not proof: the header is
client-supplied and trivially spoofed, so never use it alone for access control.
A public IP is approximate, not an identity. It geolocates roughly to a city and ISP, but not to a street address or a person. It can change on its own with dynamic addressing, and under carrier-grade NAT a single public IP is often shared by thousands of subscribers at once — so "same IP" does not mean "same user."
To go further, run a DNS lookup to see the records a hostname resolves to, inspect the raw HTTP headers a server returns, or decode the full browser string with the user-agent parser.