IP address
What is my IP address?
This is the address every site you open sees. Below it are the other things your browser volunteers at the same time — because no site reads the IP on its own.
Your public IP address
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- Country of this IP
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- Protocol
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- Browser timezone
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- Browser language
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A site compares these. An American IP with a Paris timezone is a combination that only a VPN produces. How Geo-Spoof aligns them
Read from the request you just made. Nothing is stored, nothing is logged, nothing leaves this page.
What an IP address actually gives away
Less than people fear and more than they expect. It is not your name and not your street, but it is not nothing either.
Roughly where you are
Country reliably, region usually, city often — and rarely better than that. The block-level precision you see in films does not come from an IP.
Who your provider is
The address belongs to a range registered to a company. That is how a site knows you are on a home line, a mobile network, or a datacentre — and datacentre ranges are what VPN blocks look for.
That you are the same visitor
A home IP changes rarely. That makes it a stable handle: a site that logs it can tie today's visit to last month's without a single cookie.
Every site you open, to your provider
Not from the IP itself, but from the DNS queries that go with it. Without a tunnel, whoever runs your resolver — usually your provider — sees every domain you visit.
What it does not give away: your name, your address, your identity. Those come from accounts you sign into, not from the number.
How to change it
Three routes, and they are not equivalent. Two have a catch worth knowing before you rely on them.
Restart your router
On most home connections the provider hands out a new address after a while offline. It is free and it works — but the new address is from the same provider, in the same city, and it changes nothing about who can see your traffic.
A free web proxy
Changes the address a site sees, and hands your traffic to a stranger to do it. Many inject ads, log requests, or break HTTPS to read them. If a service is free and sells nothing else, the traffic is what it sells.
A VPN
The whole connection leaves from a server in the country you chose, encrypted the whole way. The site reads that server's address, and your provider stops seeing which sites you open. It is the only one of the three that changes both halves.
Checking whether your VPN is working
Load this page with the VPN off and note the address. Turn it on, reload, and compare. If the number changed and the country matches the server you picked, the tunnel is carrying your traffic. If it did not change, the extension is probably not connected — the popup ring is green only when it is.
One thing this page cannot tell you is whether your DNS queries are also going through the tunnel. An address that changed while DNS still leaks is the most common half-working setup, and it is the one that still tells your provider which sites you open. That needs a dedicated leak test rather than an IP lookup.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my IP address change on its own?
Most home connections use dynamic addressing: the provider leases you an address and can hand you a different one after a reconnection, a router restart, or simply a lease expiry. Mobile networks change it far more often, sometimes several times an hour.
Can I hide my IP completely?
Not from the site you are connecting to — something has to receive your request and reply to it. What you can do is make the address it sees belong to a server instead of to you. That is what a VPN, a proxy or Tor each do, with very different trade-offs.
What is the difference between a static and a dynamic IP?
A static address never changes and is usually something a business pays for, because servers need to be findable. A dynamic one is reassigned periodically and is what almost every home connection gets. Static is more convenient and, for privacy, worse: it is a permanent handle.
Why is my address full of colons?
That is IPv6, the newer format, and it looks like 2a01:e0a:… rather than four numbers. There were not enough IPv4 addresses for the number of devices in the world, so IPv6 was created with vastly more. Many connections now have both, and which one a site sees depends on the site.
My VPN is on but the address did not change
Usually the extension is installed but not connected — the ring in the popup is green only when the tunnel is up. Failing that, the page may be cached: reload with a hard refresh. If the address still matches your own, check that the extension is enabled for the site rather than paused for it.
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