Does this tool send any of my data to a server?

The only data transmitted is the IP address being looked up, sent to the ipwho.is API (MIT-licensed, free, no key required). Your browser's IP is inherently included in any HTTP request — that's how the "My IP" detection works. No other input data, identifiers, or cookies are shared with ipwho.is beyond what a normal HTTP request carries.

How accurate is the geolocation?

IP geolocation is approximate. City-level accuracy is typically within 25–100 km for residential IPs and may be less accurate for VPNs, proxies, corporate networks, or mobile connections (which may resolve to the carrier's data centre rather than your physical location). Country-level accuracy is generally above 95% for residential IPs.

Why does my IP show the wrong city?

IP geolocation databases map IP ranges to locations based on registration data and network topology — not GPS. If you are behind a VPN, corporate proxy, or mobile carrier, the resolved location is typically the nearest PoP (Point of Presence) or the carrier's head office rather than your physical location.

What is the difference between ISP and Organisation?

ISP is the Internet Service Provider — the company that sells you internet access (e.g. Comcast, AT&T, BT, Jio). Organisation is the registered owner of the IP range, which may be a hosting provider, enterprise, or the ISP itself. For home broadband users these are usually the same. For cloud servers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) the Organisation will be the cloud provider.

Can I look up private IP addresses like 192.168.x.x?

Private IP addresses (RFC 1918 ranges: 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16) and loopback addresses (127.0.0.1) are not routable on the public internet, so ipwho.is cannot return geolocation data for them. Use the CIDR / Subnet Calculator tool on this site to analyse private network ranges instead.

IP Address Lookup — Geolocation, ASN & Network

Look up any IPv4 or IPv6 address: approximate location, autonomous system, network operator and reverse DNS — plus your own public address.

This tool makes an external request to ipwho.is (MIT-licensed, free). Only the queried IP is sent — no tool input, no personal data beyond what any HTTP request carries.

Enter an IP address to look up

Leave empty to detect your own IP automatically

What IP geolocation can and cannot tell you

IP geolocation resolves where a network is registered, not where a device is. The distinction matters more than the marketing around these databases suggests.

Accuracy is high at country level — typically 95–99%. At city level it is roughly 55–80% depending on the country, and below city level it is not meaningful at all. Any tool showing a precise latitude and longitude is showing you the centroid of a region, not a location; this is why a handful of arbitrary farmhouses have historically received thousands of unwanted visitors from people who assumed otherwise.

Systematic reasons it will be wrong: VPNs and proxies show the exit node. Mobile carriers route through regional gateways, so a phone in one city commonly appears in another hundreds of miles away. Corporate networks backhaul to a head office. Satellite and some rural ISPs are effectively unlocatable. Cloud IPs report the data centre.

So: fine for choosing a default currency or language, or for coarse analytics. Never use it as an authentication signal, a fraud decision on its own, or evidence of who someone is.

What the results mean

ASN (Autonomous System Number) —Identifies the network operator that announces this address block to the internet. Far more reliable than the geographic data, and often more useful — it tells you whether traffic came from a residential ISP, a mobile carrier, a hosting provider or a cloud region.
Organisation —Who the block is registered to in the regional registry. For hosting providers this is the provider, not their customer, so it identifies the infrastructure rather than the actor.
Reverse DNS (PTR) —The hostname the address maps back to. Often descriptive of the network’s role, and useful for spotting mail servers and known crawlers — though anyone controlling the address controls the PTR, so it is a hint rather than proof.
Hosting / datacentre flag —Whether the address belongs to a cloud or hosting provider. This is genuinely useful signal: an address that should be a consumer browser but resolves to a data centre is worth a second look.

Getting the real client IP in an application

Behind a proxy, load balancer or CDN, the socket address is the proxy — not the client. Recovering the real one is a common source of bugs and, occasionally, vulnerabilities.

Every request appears to come from one IP

Cause:You are reading the TCP peer address, which is your own load balancer or reverse proxy.

Fix:Read the forwarded header your proxy sets — X-Forwarded-For, or the standardised Forwarded header. Configure your framework’s trusted-proxy setting so it does this correctly rather than parsing by hand.

Rate limiting is trivially bypassed

Cause:Trusting X-Forwarded-For unconditionally. It is a client-supplied header — anyone can send any value, so per-IP limits become meaningless.

Fix:Only trust the header when the request came from a proxy you control, and take the correct entry: X-Forwarded-For is a comma-separated chain that appends on each hop, so the rightmost entry your infrastructure added is trustworthy and the leftmost is attacker-controlled.

Cloudflare or a CDN in front and IPs look wrong

Cause:The CDN sets its own header and rewrites the chain.

Fix:Use the provider’s specific header (CF-Connecting-IP for Cloudflare, True-Client-IP for several others) and restrict your origin to accept connections only from the CDN’s published ranges — otherwise someone can bypass the CDN and spoof it.

An IP allow-list blocks legitimate users intermittently

Cause:Residential addresses are dynamic and mobile addresses change as the device moves between towers. IPv6 privacy extensions rotate the address routinely.

Fix:Do not build access control on IP addresses for consumer traffic. Allow-lists work for fixed office ranges and server-to-server traffic, and poorly for anything else.

An IP address is personal data

Worth stating plainly because it has direct compliance consequences. Under the GDPR, an IP address is personal data — the Court of Justice of the European Union settled this in Breyer (2016) for dynamic addresses, on the basis that the operator can plausibly combine it with information held by the ISP to identify someone.

Practically, that means logging IP addresses needs a lawful basis, a stated retention period, and disclosure in your privacy policy. Most operators rely on legitimate interests for security logging, which is generally defensible for a bounded period — but "we keep all access logs forever" is not.

Sensible defaults: keep raw addresses only as long as you need them for security and abuse handling, then truncate (dropping the last octet of an IPv4 address, or the last 80 bits of an IPv6 one) or delete. Analytics almost never needs the full address; truncation preserves country-level utility while removing most of the identifiability.

About

The IP Address Lookup tool shows detailed information for any IPv4 or IPv6 address: country and city, region, continent, geographic coordinates, ISP (Internet Service Provider), organisation name, registered timezone, currency, and international calling code. When you open the tool without entering an IP, it automatically detects and shows information for your own public IP address. To look up a different IP, type or paste any valid IPv4 or IPv6 address into the search box and press "Look up". The tool is powered by ipwho.is — a free, MIT-licensed, open API that requires no API key. Only the IP address being queried is transmitted to ipwho.is; no other data is sent. The API response is displayed directly in your browser and never stored or forwarded.

How to use

1 Open the tool — your own public IP address is detected and displayed automatically.
2 To look up a different IP, type any valid IPv4 (e.g. 8.8.8.8) or IPv6 address into the search box.
3 Click "Look up" or press Enter to fetch the geolocation and network information.
4 Click "My IP" to reset and look up your own IP again.
5 Use "Copy all" to copy the full result as plain text to your clipboard.
6 Click the OpenStreetMap link below the results to view the approximate location on a map.

Does this tool send any of my data to a server?: The only data transmitted is the IP address being looked up, sent to the ipwho.is API (MIT-licensed, free, no key required). Your browser's IP is inherently included in any HTTP request — that's how the "My IP" detection works. No other input data, identifiers, or cookies are shared with ipwho.is beyond what a normal HTTP request carries.
How accurate is the geolocation?: IP geolocation is approximate. City-level accuracy is typically within 25–100 km for residential IPs and may be less accurate for VPNs, proxies, corporate networks, or mobile connections (which may resolve to the carrier's data centre rather than your physical location). Country-level accuracy is generally above 95% for residential IPs.
Why does my IP show the wrong city?: IP geolocation databases map IP ranges to locations based on registration data and network topology — not GPS. If you are behind a VPN, corporate proxy, or mobile carrier, the resolved location is typically the nearest PoP (Point of Presence) or the carrier's head office rather than your physical location.
What is the difference between ISP and Organisation?: ISP is the Internet Service Provider — the company that sells you internet access (e.g. Comcast, AT&T, BT, Jio). Organisation is the registered owner of the IP range, which may be a hosting provider, enterprise, or the ISP itself. For home broadband users these are usually the same. For cloud servers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) the Organisation will be the cloud provider.
Can I look up private IP addresses like 192.168.x.x?: Private IP addresses (RFC 1918 ranges: 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16) and loopback addresses (127.0.0.1) are not routable on the public internet, so ipwho.is cannot return geolocation data for them. Use the CIDR / Subnet Calculator tool on this site to analyse private network ranges instead.

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