What’s My IP Address?

The information exposed to every website you visit.

As you probably already know, your IP address is the “address” or logical (not physical) location of your computer or router that is connected to the internet.

There are plenty of sites that can tell you your IP address. In fact, any website you visit can see it.

I’ll tell you your IP address, but also show you a few additional bits of information that you’re sharing with every website you visit.

Your IP Address

Every website you visit can see your IP address (the online address of your computer or router). Sites can also see your browser type and possibly where you came from.

Your IP address

This is the IP address of the device you have connected to the internet. If you have a single computer, it’s likely to be the IP address of the computer itself. On the other hand, if you are behind a router, which is most likely the case, the IP address shown here is the IP address of that router’s connection to the internet.

Your IP address is not private. It’s a fundamental part of how information is transferred around the internet. Every website sees your IP address in order to be able to send information — like this web page — back to you.

“Reverse DNS” on that IP address returns 216.73.217.71.

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If that’s still just the IP address, there’s nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, if it’s something else, perhaps something that looks like an internet domain name, that information usually quickly and easily identifies your ISP.

Speaking of which, you can get even more information about the ISP that owns your IP address by visiting http://whois.domaintools.com/216.73.217.71. This service queries the ARIN whois database. ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, is the primary authority for the assignment of IP addresses and IP address ranges.

Various geo-locating services may attempt to tell you where your IP address resides physically. I’m not going to link to any of them because they are notoriously inaccurate. Frequently, the only thing they get right is the country. (Mine, for example, is typically about 300 miles off.)

Additional Information

Your “User Agent” string is: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com).

The User Agent — which is a fancy term for web browser — is a relatively complex bit of information that identifies which browser you’re using as well as additional information about your operating system and language. There are thousands of different browsers, spiders, and other utilities for fetching webpages, so there are thousands of different possibilities for a User Agent string. It’s also possible to configure some browsers or tools to lie — for example, it’s possible to force Firefox to report a user agent string identifying itself as Microsoft Edge — perhaps to bypass restrictions for sites that work with only Edge.

Your “Referrer” string is: .

The referrer string is a little-known but interesting bit of information provided to websites by most browsers. In short, if you click on a link to get to this page, the ‘referrer’ is the link back to the page you were on that had that link. It’s the page that “referred” you here, also known as the page you came from.

If you found this page via a search engine, things get even more interesting. Typically, the URL of the page you were on in the search engine — the search results page that contained a link to this page — includes the search terms you were looking for that generated those results. That means that websites know not only that you came from a search engine results page, but also specifically what you were searching for. (Most search engines no longer provide this information for privacy reasons.)

Other, more obscure bits of information are passed around as well, but these (your IP address, ISP,  browser, and the webpage that referred you) are the ones all websites get.

Special IP addresses

There are certain IP addresses you’ll never see on the internet, but you may see elsewhere. For example, many of these are common if you look at the IP address of your computer instead of the IP address of your router’s internet connection.

127.0.0.1: refers specifically to the machine it’s being used on. Another way to think of it is “myself”, though the formal name is “localhost”.

10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x-172.31.x.x, 192.168.x.x: these are “local” IP addresses. These are used on local networks, not directly connected to the internet. If you use a router (and it’s likely you do), your device will have a local IP address in one of these ranges, while your router will have a “real” IP address for its connection to the internet.

169.254.x.x: An IP address in this range is auto-assigned when DHCP fails, meaning your computer asked the router for an IP address and didn’t receive a response. In this case, Windows will report that you have limited connectivity.