What Is My IP Address? Public IP, Geolocation, and ISP Explained
How public IP addresses work, what IP geolocation can and cannot reveal, and how to look up any IPv4 or IPv6 address for free.
Every device on the internet has an address. When you open a website, your request carries a return address so the server knows where to send the page. That return address is your public IP, and it leaks more than most people assume.
Public vs private IP
Two kinds of address are in play here, and people mix them up constantly.
Your private IP is the one your router hands out inside your home or office, usually something like 192.168.1.42 or 10.0.0.5. It only means anything on your local network. Your laptop, phone, and smart TV each get their own.
Your public IP is the one your provider assigns to the whole connection, and it’s what the outside world sees. Open the IP Address Lookup and the big number at the top is this one: the same address every site you visit writes into its access logs.
What an IP can reveal (and what it can’t)
This is where expectations drift from reality.
An IP maps to a rough location, an internet provider, and a network operator (the ASN). That’s useful. If you want to check whether your VPN actually routes through Amsterdam, the country and ISP tell you in a second.
But “rough” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Geolocation databases map your IP to wherever your provider routes it, not to your front door. I’ve looked up my own connection and landed in a city 40 km away, at what turned out to be an ISP exchange point. On mobile data it gets worse, because carriers funnel thousands of users through a handful of gateways.
So an IP can place you in a region. It cannot pull up your street address. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling something.
Why your IP might surprise you
A few situations throw people off:
- You’re on a VPN or proxy, so the IP belongs to that service, not you.
- You’re on mobile data, and carrier-grade NAT puts you in a distant city.
- Your provider rotates dynamic IPs, so the address changes every few days.
- You have IPv6, and the address looks nothing like the familiar four-number format.
IPv6 deserves a mention. It looks like 2001:4860:4860::8888, eight groups of hex instead of four decimal numbers. We ran out of IPv4 addresses years ago. There are only about 4.3 billion of them, and the planet passed that many connected devices long before your fridge got Wi-Fi. IPv6 fills the gap with a pool big enough that nobody is counting.
Looking up an address that isn’t yours
The tool isn’t limited to your own connection. Paste any IPv4 address, IPv6 address, or domain name, and it resolves the location, provider, and ASN.
That comes up more often than you’d think. Got a login alert with an unfamiliar IP attached? Look it up and see which country and hosting company it belongs to. Curious where a website is actually served from? Enter the domain. The answer is frequently a CDN like Cloudflare or Fastly rather than the company’s own servers, which tells you something about how the site is built.
A note on privacy
Your IP is exposed by design. It has to be, or replies would have nowhere to go. Every site sees it. What you can control is the layer above: a VPN swaps your visible IP for the provider’s, and that’s the main lever ordinary users have against IP-based tracking.
When you run a lookup here, the address goes to a public geolocation API to fetch the location data. belun.app doesn’t store the result or keep logs, and the number was public to begin with.
Want to see what the internet sees when you connect? Open the IP Address Lookup and your IP and its details load the moment the page does.