IP Location Lookup
Enter any public IPv4 or IPv6 address and get its country, city, ISP and network. Country is usually reliable; city is an estimate.
Enter any public IPv4 or IPv6 address above to look up its geographic location, ISP, and network details. All lookups are proxied server-side, so your browser never contacts the geo API directly.
How to look up an IP address's location
Paste a public IP to see the network that owns it and the approximate place it's linked to.
- 01
Paste a public IPv4 or IPv6 address
Copy it from a server log, an email header or a firewall alert. To see your own address, use My IP Address instead, since this box needs an address to look up.
- 02
Read the network before the city
The ISP, organisation and AS number tell you whose network the address belongs to: a home broadband provider, a mobile carrier, or a cloud host such as AWS or Google Cloud. That's often more useful than the location.
- 03
Open the map link with care
The coordinates open in Google Maps. They mark the centre of the area the database assigns to the address, not a building, so treat the pin as a rough region.
Where the location comes from
Our server sends the address to ip-api.com, a geolocation database, and shows the country, region, city, postal code, coordinates, ISP, organisation and AS number it returns. Databases like this are built from regional internet registry records, ISP data and network measurements. None of it involves the device itself, so there's no GPS and no exact address.
That's why the precision varies by connection type. Fixed broadband usually lands in the right country and often the right metro area. Mobile networks route traffic through a small number of gateways, so a phone in one city can show up hundreds of kilometres away. Cloud and VPN addresses show the data centre, which says nothing about where the person behind them is.
Reading the result for common tasks
The same lookup answers different questions depending on why you're asking:
| You want to know | Look at | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Is a sign-up genuine? | ISP and organisation | Data-centre and VPN networks are common for both privacy users and fraud |
| Is my VPN working? | Country | The VPN's exit country should appear, not your own |
| Who is hitting my server? | Organisation and AS number | Report abuse to the network owner, not the city |
| Where is a server hosted? | Country and organisation | CDNs answer from many places under one address |
| Where did an email come from? | The first external IP in the Received headers | Big mail providers show their own servers, not the sender |
Finding the sender's IP in an email
Every mail server that handles a message adds a Received line to the top of its headers, so they read from newest at the top to oldest at the bottom. In Gmail, open the message, choose Show original, and read the Received lines from the bottom up. The first one added by a server outside the sender's own mail system, usually containing "from" and an address in square brackets, is the one to look up.
Don't expect it to reveal much for big providers. Gmail, Outlook and other webmail services generally don't include the sender's home IP, so you'll see the provider's own servers instead. The lookup is more telling for business mail sent from a company's own server, or for spam sent through compromised machines, where the network and country can confirm that a message claiming to be from your bank came from somewhere else entirely.
When an IP lookup helps
Checking a VPN's exit country
Look up the address your VPN gives you to confirm traffic leaves from the country you picked.
Triaging suspicious log entries
An address hammering your login page that belongs to a hosting company is more likely a bot than a customer.
Confirming a cloud server's region
After deploying, check that a server's public IP sits in the expected country for data-residency or latency reasons.
Limits worth knowing
- Private addresses such as 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x and 127.0.0.1 have no public location and won't return results.
- One address per lookup. There's no bulk mode for a log file.
- Results are only as current as the database. Address blocks change hands, so a recently moved range may show its old owner for a while.
- The address you enter is sent to ip-api.com to do the lookup. We don't store it.