IP Address Lookup
Enter any IPv4, IPv6 address or domain name to see where it is registered, who runs the network and which time zone it sits in.
How an IP lookup actually works
No single authority publishes a map of the internet. A lookup stitches together two very different kinds of record.
The first is registration data. Regional registries such as ARIN, RIPE NCC and APNIC allocate blocks of addresses to network operators, and those allocations are public. That is where the ISP name, the organisation and the autonomous system number come from, and it is highly reliable.
The second is inferred geography. Commercial databases estimate where a block is used by combining registry hints, latency measurements between known servers, WiFi and mobile signals, and corrections submitted by users. That estimate is where city, postal code and coordinates come from, and it is a good guess rather than a fact.
Accuracy in practice
| Field | Typical reliability | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Country | Very high | Address blocks are allocated per region and rarely move |
| ISP and ASN | Very high | Comes from public registry records |
| City | Moderate | Inferred; mobile and satellite links skew heavily |
| Postal code | Low | Frequently the ISP office, not the user |
| Coordinates | Low | Often the geographic centre of a city or country |
What people use this for
- Checking a suspicious login. Compare the address in a security alert against where you actually were.
- Reading server logs. Work out whether traffic came from a home connection, a company, or a data centre.
- Debugging a CDN. Confirm which edge location is answering for a hostname.
- Verifying a VPN exit node. Look up the address a VPN gave you and see where the world thinks you are.
Want to know what your address exposes? The what is my IP page runs the same lookup against your own connection.