What Is My IP Address?

With the VPN off, every site sees the address your internet provider assigned you, and the panel above shows that provider's name, its network number (ASN) and roughly where you are. With the VPN on, websites see the VPN server's address instead, so the panel should switch to the server's location and a hosting or VPN network. Your real IP is not hidden from everyone: the VPN provider still sees it, which is why its logging policy matters. The quickest proof is to note the IP, toggle the VPN, press Re-check and compare.

Some VPNs use exit addresses that look residential, so with a working VPN the verdict box can still read "Mixed signals". The toggle test settles it: if the IP changes when you switch the VPN on, the VPN is carrying this browser's traffic. For a guided check that adds WebRTC and timezone consistency, use Is My VPN Working?

An IP address is the return address of everything you do online. Every website you open, every app that phones home, and every ad network embedded in a page receives it automatically — there is no opt-out, because without it the response traffic couldn't find its way back to you.

On its own, an IP address won't hand a stranger your name or street address. But it does reveal more than most people expect: your approximate location (usually accurate to the city), your internet service provider, your connection type (home broadband, mobile, business line), and a stable identifier that lets sites and trackers recognize you across visits. Combine that with browser fingerprinting and account logins, and your IP becomes one thread in a very detailed profile. It's also the primary signal streaming platforms, online stores, and betting sites use to decide what content and prices to show you — and the identifier that appears in server logs when anyone investigates online activity.

That's why "what is my IP" is the first check in every VPN test we run: whatever address appears in the panel above is exactly what the rest of the internet sees.

The panel labels your address IPv4 or IPv6. IPv4 is the classic format — four numbers separated by dots, like 203.0.113.42. Its addresses are 32 bits long (RFC 791), which allows about 4.3 billion of them. They ran out years ago, so ISPs increasingly share one IPv4 address across many customers (a setup called CGNAT). IPv6 is the replacement — eight groups of hexadecimal characters separated by colons, 128 bits in all (RFC 8200) — with enough addresses to give every grain of sand on Earth trillions of its own.

The privacy nuance matters: because IPv6 addresses are so plentiful, your devices often get unique ones — better for engineers, worse for anonymity. A VPN deals with IPv6 in one of two ways: it carries IPv6 through the tunnel, or it turns IPv6 off so nothing can leave outside it. Proton VPN, for example, documents IPv6 support in some of its apps and keeps IPv6 turned off in the others for exactly that reason.

Does a VPN hide my IPv6 address?

It should, and this page shows you whether yours does. vpnrank.io answers over both IPv4 and IPv6, and browsers that follow Happy Eyeballs (RFC 8305) try IPv6 first when it works. So if the panel shows an IPv6 address while your VPN is connected, read the provider and ASN fields: a hosting or VPN network means the VPN is carrying your IPv6 traffic; your own ISP's name means IPv6 is going around the tunnel. An IPv4 address with the VPN on is normal. The panel shows one address per check — the one your browser used for that request — so it catches the common IPv6 leak but is not a full IPv6 leak test. Addresses exposed by the browser itself are what our WebRTC leak test looks for.

A VPN puts a middleman between you and the internet — deliberately. Your device opens an encrypted tunnel to a VPN server, and all your traffic exits from that server. Every website you visit then sees the server's IP address instead of yours. Your ISP still knows you're connected to a VPN, but can no longer see which sites you visit; the sites can no longer see who or where you really are.

The result is visible right in the tool above. Without a VPN, the panel shows your home connection: your city, your ISP's name, your timezone. Connect to a VPN server in, say, Amsterdam, hit Re-check, and everything flips — a Dutch IP, a hosting-company network name, an Amsterdam timezone. That flip is precisely what you're paying a VPN for, which is why we verify it on every server we test in our methodology.

Not all providers do this equally well. In our testing, the consistently clean performers — correct exit IP, no DNS or WebRTC leaks, working kill switch — include NordVPN and ExpressVPN, and the full picture is in our best VPN rankings. Masking your IP is table stakes; keeping it masked under failure conditions is what separates the good ones — and you can check that part yourself with our VPN kill switch test.

Each field in the panel answers a different question, and the VPN on/off table at the top of this page lists what each one should show and what a bad result looks like. Two fields need a word of explanation. Network (ASN) is the autonomous system number of the network that announces your address — one operator's routing domain, as RFC 1930 defines it — so it names who runs the network, not who you are. IP timezone is the timezone of the place the IP geolocates to, which the panel compares with your device's clock.

The interpretation box below the grid applies these rules automatically. A VPN exit almost always belongs to a hosting or infrastructure company, so a datacenter-flavored network name is a good sign your VPN is on. A consumer ISP name plus a timezone that matches your device usually means you're exposed. And when the signals disagree, trust the manual test over any heuristic: toggle your VPN and watch whether the IP changes. For a deeper multi-check verdict, use our Is My VPN Working? tool, or investigate any specific address with the IP address lookup.

One caveat on accuracy: IP geolocation databases are good at country level, decent at city level, and unreliable at street level. If the city shown is 50 km off, that's normal — it reflects where your ISP registered the address block, not where you sit.

Where the panel's data comes from

vpnrank.io runs behind Cloudflare, which passes our server the address your connection arrived from (the CF-Connecting-IP header) together with Cloudflare's own estimate of your city, region and timezone. Your browser then asks ipwho.is, a free IP lookup service, for the provider name and ASN, and the panel prefers its location and timezone when it answers. If an ad blocker stops that request, the provider and ASN fields read "Not available" and the box asks you to do the toggle test instead. The panel shows one address per check, the one your browser used for that request, and we don't store lookups.

A VPN isn't the only way to change the address this page shows — but it's the only one we recommend for everyday use. Here is how the three realistic options stack up:

Free proxies deserve a special warning: an unencrypted middleman that can read your traffic is a downgrade, not a privacy tool. Tor is genuinely powerful but too slow for streaming or large downloads. For the combination most people need — hidden IP, encrypted traffic, and full-speed browsing — a reputable paid VPN wins, and if budget is the blocker, Proton VPN's free tier and the 30-day money-back guarantees on our top-ranked services cover the gap. The VPN speed figures in the table come from our Q3 2026 benchmark (25 August 2026), where the 8 VPNs we benchmark reached 415–478 Mbps on a 1 Gbps fiber line; the speed benchmark data shows exactly how much speed each provider keeps.

If you've ever checked your device settings and seen an address like 192.168.1.23, that's your private IP — an internal label your router assigns inside your home network. The ranges 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, and 172.16–31.x.x are reserved for private networks by RFC 1918 and never appear on the public internet. Your router translates between those private addresses and the single public IP your ISP assigned you — the one this page shows. A VPN changes your public IP; your private IP stays the same and doesn't need hiding, because nobody outside your network can see it anyway.

If your router's own internet-facing address starts with 100.64 to 100.127, your ISP uses carrier-grade NAT: that block (100.64.0.0/10) was set aside in 2012 by RFC 6598 as shared address space between the ISP's NAT and your router. It is not the public IP websites see either, which is why this page and your router can show different numbers. Our guide to static vs dynamic IP addresses explains why the public one changes.