What is my IP address? Your public IP, its location and the country streaming services see

What is my IP address?

Your IP address is the public address your internet provider, or your VPN, gives your connection, and every website you visit sees it. The box above shows yours. Sites turn it into a country, which is reliable, and a city, which is a rough guess. Streaming services such as Netflix and BBC iPlayer use that country to pick your catalog and decide what you can play.

Your public IP address is the one every website sees

An IP address, short for Internet Protocol address, is the number that identifies a connection on the internet, so data can find its way to it . The one this tool shows is the public address of your connection. Your internet provider, or a VPN server, puts it on your traffic as it leaves for the internet. It is what websites and apps see when you visit them.

The address in your computer or phone settings is often a different one. Home routers hand out private addresses, such as 192.168.1.20, from three blocks set aside for internal networks, and those addresses are not passed on to the internet . Some internet providers and mobile networks go a step further and put customers behind shared addresses, from a range reserved for that purpose .

Source: IETF standards RFC 1918, RFC 6598 and RFC 8200. Checked October 2026.

IPv6 uses addresses of 128 bits instead of the 32 bits of IPv4 , so an IPv6 result looks far longer. As of 4 October 2026, about half of Google's users reached it over IPv6 . If your connection has both kinds, the tool shows the one your browser used to reach us, and sites that support IPv6 will usually see that one too.

How to read your result: the country is solid, the city is an estimate

Trust the country more than the city. MaxMind, which sells IP location data, rates its own country data at 99.8% accuracy and its US city data far lower . The box beside the title shows five things.

Source: MaxMind accuracy estimates; IETF RFC 1930. Checked October 2026.

The pin on the map marks an approximate point, not your home. MaxMind says IP location is never precise enough to find a household or a street address , and it gives an accuracy radius rather than a point .

The network number matters more than it looks. MaxMind also labels addresses by type, such as VPN, hosting provider or Tor exit, the last relay of the Tor anonymity network . It says an address that belongs to a data center is itself a sign of a VPN . A home connection normally shows your internet provider's network, while a VPN connection shows the network that runs the VPN's servers.

Streaming services decide your country from this address

Streaming services read the same address to decide where you are. The BBC says it locates your internet provider so that only people in the UK can watch . BBC iPlayer shows an error when it does not recognize your address as a UK one . ESPN says your IP address decides whether a game is blacked out where you are .

Netflix uses your address in three ways:

• Outside your sign-up country, the catalog follows the country you are in , and the library itself varies by country . That is why the Netflix catalog and its VPN rules change with your location.
• On ad-supported plans, ads may be chosen from the general location of your IP address .
• Your Netflix household is set from your IP address, device IDs and account activity, and Netflix says it does not use GPS for it .

Services also try to detect VPNs. When Netflix decides you are using one, it shows error E106: "You seem to be using a VPN or proxy" . The fixes for Netflix error E106 cover what to do next.

Why your IP address shows the wrong city or country

MaxMind's own figures place far more addresses in the wrong city than in the wrong country. Catalogs such as Netflix's go by country, but local sports blackouts can follow the area your address is placed in. Match what you see to the rows below.

Sources: MaxMind; ESPN; BBC iPlayer help; ABC; Netflix help; UK NCSC. Checked October 2026.

Split tunneling, a VPN setting that lets some apps or sites bypass the VPN, can leave this browser out. Then this page shows your real address even with the VPN connected.

How to get a wrong location fixed, or change it on purpose

When your own location is shown wrongly and a service blocks you because of it, the fix goes through your internet provider. Work through these steps in order.

1. Turn off any VPN, proxy, antivirus VPN, data saver or web accelerator, then reload this page.
2. Note the IP address and the country shown here, then check the Client country on fast.com.
3. Give both to your internet provider. Netflix says that if they match the location and address the provider assigned to your home, the provider must contact Netflix. If they do not, the provider should check that you use its DNS server, the service that looks up site names, and switch you to it .
4. Ask whether the address is new. The BBC says a newly assigned address can take a few weeks to be recognized as UK .
5. Optional: look the address up in your regional internet registry, such as RIPE in Europe, as ITV suggests to viewers it places outside the UK .

Changing the country on purpose is what a VPN does. Sites see the address of the VPN server, which NordVPN says its customers usually share , so this page shows the server's country. Smart DNS, a service that answers the lookups for streaming sites from its own servers , does not change your IP address , so it never changes what this page shows.

Netflix, BBC iPlayer and YouTube TV say they restrict or refuse playback when they detect a VPN . Our guide to the VPNs that work for streaming shows which ones get through in our research. If BBC iPlayer says it only works in the UK, our BBC iPlayer fix guide has the steps.

What this tool does not show

This page shows the address and location of the connection your browser used to reach us. It leaves out several things that can still give your location away:

• Whether your browser reveals another address through WebRTC, the part of the browser that runs video calls. The WebRTC leak test checks that.
• Where your DNS requests go. A DNS leak sends the lookups for site names outside the VPN, often to your provider .
• Your device's GPS. YouTube TV can verify your playback area with a phone's location , and 7plus can require browser Location Services . This page never asks for your location.
• Other apps and devices. A TV app or a phone on mobile data can use another connection, so run the check on the device you watch on.

On a Fire TV Stick with no regular browser, the guide to checking the VPN on a Fire TV Stick shows where to open an IP-check page.

How this tool works and what it keeps

whatworks.tech runs behind Cloudflare, which passes our server the country, city, region, coordinates and time zone it derives from your IP address . The tool reads them from the request your browser has just sent, together with the address itself and its network number, and sends them straight back to your browser.

Only Cloudflare and our hosting provider handle it, and we do not store your address or its location, apart from the technical logs our privacy policy describes. The map and the time zone come from the same location data, so they are only as precise as the city. The privacy policy describes what the tools handle and for how long.

Where to go next

• VPN and IP tools: the IP, VPN and WebRTC checks in the order to run them, and the VPN IP checker for any address.
• Why Netflix shows error E106: what to do when Netflix thinks you use a VPN.
• Netflix with a VPN, library by library: which catalog you get in each country, and which VPNs work.
• Best VPNs for streaming: which VPNs work with each service in our research.
• Check whether an IP is a VPN: whether an address, yours or one you paste, is flagged as a VPN, data center or Tor exit.