What your IP address is (and what it is not)
The address on this page is your public IP: the single address the rest of the internet uses to send packets back to your network. Every request your browser makes carries it, so every website, game server and mail server you touch already knows it. There is nothing you can do on a web page to hide it from the sites you visit — only changing the path (a VPN, a proxy, a different network) changes the address they see.
It is not the address of your laptop or phone. Inside your home you almost certainly have a private address such as 192.168.0.14 or 10.0.0.5 (RFC 1918), and your router translates it. Dozens of devices in the house share the one public address you see here, which is why this page cannot tell you which device you are on.
- Public IP: what this page shows, visible to every site you open.
- Private IP: 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x or 172.16–31.x.x inside your own network; only your router and other devices at home see it.
IPv4, IPv6 and why you may have both
IPv4 addresses are 32 bits — about 4.3 billion of them, and they ran out years ago. IPv6 is 128 bits, written as eight groups of four hex digits, and a home subscriber is typically delegated a whole /64 (or larger) block. Most connections today are dual-stack: both protocols work, and each connection picks one.
Which one wins is decided by Happy Eyeballs (RFC 8305): the browser starts both attempts, slightly favours IPv6, and keeps whichever answers first. That is why one site’s log shows your IPv6 and another’s shows your IPv4 within the same minute.
If this page shows no IPv6, nothing is broken: your ISP or router simply has not enabled it. If it shows no IPv4, you are probably on a mobile network that is IPv6-only and translates IPv4 with NAT64/464XLAT (RFC 6146, RFC 6877) — an arrangement most users never notice.
Why sites show you a different IP address
Six things routinely produce two different answers, and this page flags the ones it can detect.
- Dual stack: one site logged your IPv6, the other your IPv4. Both are yours.
- Carrier-grade NAT: your ISP puts hundreds of subscribers behind a pool of public addresses. Different connections can leave through different pool members.
- A VPN, a corporate proxy or Cloudflare WARP rewrites the exit address for some traffic and not for other traffic — split tunnelling is the usual cause of a mismatch.
What your IP does and does not reveal about your location
An IP address carries no coordinates. Geolocation services build a table by combining the regional registry record, routing data and the provider’s own hints, then guess a city. Country accuracy is usually good; city accuracy is a coin flip on mobile and on large ISPs, where the address belongs to a gateway that may be in another province entirely.
That is also the honest answer to “can someone find my house from my IP?”. They cannot. Only your ISP knows which subscriber held an address at a given moment. What an address does reveal to anyone is your provider, your rough region and whether you are on a hosting provider, a VPN or a residential line.
The “nearest CDN” line on this page is a different, more reliable signal: it is the Cloudflare data centre your packets actually reached, identified by its IATA airport code.