What Is My IP Address?

What is an IP address, exactly?

It's the return address on every packet of data your device sends out.

Every time you load a webpage, your computer or phone sends little packets of data across the internet asking for it. Those packets need a way to find their way back to you, which is what an IP address is: a numeric label that uniquely identifies your connection on the network. Your internet provider assigns it to you, the server you're talking to reads it from the packets, and they use it to send the page back.

What's important about this is that your IP isn't a secret. There's no setting you can flip to hide it from the websites you visit — they need it to talk back to you. The only way to change what they see is to route your traffic through a different server first, which is what a VPN does. The IP shown above is the address every site you visit right now is reading.

One nuance: the IP your devices have inside your home network (something like 192.168.1.4) is different from the one the internet sees. Your home router has a public IP from your provider, and all your devices share it through a process called NAT. The public IP is what matters for privacy and tracking.

What can websites actually see from your IP?

Roughly where in the world you are, which internet provider you use, and that all your visits in a session are from the same person.

Websites can run your IP through a public geolocation database and get back a rough location — usually accurate to a city or metro area. They get your internet provider's name (sometimes called the ASN or autonomous system number), which often signals whether you're on a residential connection, mobile data, a corporate network, or a known data centre. They can also see whether your IP has appeared on a list of known VPNs, proxies, or Tor exit nodes.

What they can't see directly from the IP alone is your name, your street address, your account on their site, or your real identity. Those connections only happen when they cross-reference your IP with other signals — cookies, browser fingerprints, accounts, or, in rare cases, legal requests to your ISP.

The most important thing to understand: every site you visit during a session sees the same IP, which is enough for them to tie your visits together. Even private browsing won't change that. The only way to break the link is to change the IP itself.

How accurate is IP-based location?

Usually city-level on residential connections, but it can be off by 50 to 200 km on mobile data.

IP geolocation works by mapping blocks of IP addresses to physical locations using public databases. When your ISP gets allocated an IP range, the registration usually points to their regional hub — so for residential broadband you'll often see your city or a nearby one. Accuracy in this case is typically within 10 to 30 km.

Mobile data is different. Your phone's IP usually maps to wherever your carrier's regional gateway is, which might be in a totally different city from where you are. Travellers see this all the time — you can be in one city and have a public IP that geolocates 200 km away. That's not a bug, it's just how mobile networks route traffic.

Corporate VPNs and proxies add another layer. If your work laptop is connected to a company VPN, your IP geolocates to wherever the company's VPN exit is, not where you physically are. The same applies when you connect to a consumer VPN like OllaVPN — sites see the location of the exit, not yours.

What else does your browser reveal beyond the IP?

A surprising amount — enough to identify you even with a different IP and no cookies.

Your browser sends a header called the User-Agent with every request, identifying the browser and operating system. JavaScript on the page can ask for your screen size, timezone, language, list of installed fonts, GPU details, and more. Sites can also measure how your device renders certain graphics — a technique called canvas fingerprinting — to get a unique signature even if nothing else identifies you.

Put together, these signals form what's known as a browser fingerprint. Research consistently shows that the combination is unique enough to identify a specific browser instance with high accuracy, even without any cookies set. Changing your IP doesn't change your fingerprint. That's why a VPN is one layer of privacy, not the whole story.

If browser fingerprinting concerns you, the right tool is a privacy-focused browser like Tor Browser or Brave with fingerprint protection enabled. They make your browser look like everyone else's, neutralising the technique. A VPN handles the IP-level tracking; a privacy browser handles the fingerprint-level tracking. Both together is the strongest position.

How does a VPN change what you see here?

Your real IP gets replaced with the VPN server's IP, and the location follows it.

When you connect to a VPN, all your internet traffic travels through an encrypted tunnel to a VPN server. That server then makes requests to the websites on your behalf, using its own IP. From the site's perspective, you are wherever the VPN server is — Frankfurt, New York, Tokyo, whatever you pick. Reload this page after connecting to a VPN and you'll see the change immediately.

Your internet provider sees that you're connected to a VPN (they can see the encrypted traffic going to a VPN server), but they can't see what you do beyond that. The sites you visit only see the VPN's IP, never yours. Even if multiple people use the same VPN server, the IP they get is the same — which is part of what makes VPN traffic hard to attribute to one person.

One caveat: a VPN doesn't fix browser fingerprinting. It also doesn't log you out of accounts. If you log into your Google account through a VPN, Google still knows it's you — they just don't know your real IP. Our free plan gives you a VPN exit IP in every country we serve, for as long as you want, with no card required.

What's the difference between IPv4 and IPv6?

IPv4 is the older numbering scheme; IPv6 is the bigger newer one, and most modern connections have both.

IPv4 addresses are the familiar four-number kind, like 203.0.113.45. They were designed in the early 1980s and there are only about 4 billion of them — long since exhausted. Internet providers work around this by sharing one IPv4 address across many customers using a technology called CGNAT, which means your "public" IP may actually be shared with hundreds of other households.

IPv6 is the modern replacement, with effectively unlimited addresses. They look like 2001:db8::1 and your ISP usually gives you a giant block all to yourself. Most modern devices, networks, and websites support both IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel. A site might know you by either address, so a privacy-focused VPN routes both protocols through the tunnel — otherwise your IPv6 traffic can leak around it. Ours does this by default.

What can you actually do about it?

Combine a trustworthy VPN with a privacy-focused browser, and accept that perfect anonymity online is rare.

Step one is a VPN that handles both IPv4 and IPv6 inside the tunnel, includes a kill switch that's on by default, and doesn't keep logs of what you do. Our lifetime free plan gives you all of that without a card. Test before and after by reloading this page — you should see a completely different IP and location.

Step two is reducing what your browser tells sites. Tor Browser is the strongest answer, though it slows down general browsing. Brave with shields and fingerprint protection on is a more practical daily driver. Firefox with the resistFingerprinting setting and a few extensions like uBlock Origin is also a solid option.

Step three is accepting realistic limits. A determined adversary with deep enough resources — a government, a serious advertiser with cross-site data — can still piece you together. The goal isn't perfect anonymity; it's making yourself a hard target so the bulk of casual tracking just doesn't work on you.

Frequently asked questions