What your IP address actually reveals — and what it does not
Look up your own address on almost any site and you will be shown a city, a pair of coordinates and a map pin. It looks precise. Some of it is solid fact, some of it is an educated guess, and the two are almost never labelled differently.
Here is which is which.
Fact: the network that announces you
Every routable address on the internet sits inside a prefix that some autonomous system announces via BGP. This is not a database somebody compiled; it is the routing table that decides where your packets physically go. If it were wrong, you would have no connectivity.
From it you get, reliably:
- The origin AS number and name — usually your ISP or hosting provider.
- The announced prefix, for example
203.0.113.0/24. - The regional registry that allocated it (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC or AFRINIC) and the date.
Separately, the registry's own record — queryable over RDAP, the successor to WHOIS — gives the organisation the block is registered to, the exact range and the allocation type. Also fact, though it describes who holds the block, which is not always who is using it.
Estimate: the city on the map
There is no authoritative source for where an IP address physically is. No registry records it. Geolocation providers infer it, and they are working from registration data, network latency measurements, information ISPs volunteer, and user-reported corrections.
The consequences:
- Country is usually right. Good providers are accurate at country level the large majority of the time.
- City is often wrong. A frequent outcome is the ISP's registered office or a regional hub rather than where you are. People in small towns are routinely placed in the nearest large city.
- The coordinates are not your address. They usually point at a city centre or, when the provider has nothing better, a country's approximate centroid. Any two addresses in the same block often return identical coordinates.
- Mobile networks are worse. Carriers route large subscriber populations through a handful of gateways, so your address may geolocate hundreds of kilometres from your phone.
Anycast makes this stranger still. A single address like a public DNS resolver is announced from dozens of locations at once and answers from whichever is nearest. Ask two providers where it is and they will reasonably give different answers, because there is no single correct one.
The tell: when the sources disagree
Because geolocation and routing data are independent, comparing them is informative. When the geolocation provider says one country and the registry that allocated the block says another, something sits in between.
It could be a VPN or proxy. It could be an anycast deployment. It could be a block that was transferred between regions and never re-recorded. The disagreement is real evidence; the explanation is not something the data can settle on its own. Any tool claiming to have detected a VPN from this alone is overstating what it knows.
Reverse DNS proves nothing by itself
A PTR record maps an address back to a name, and it is often the most human-readable clue about an address — hostnames frequently encode the city, the datacenter or the connection type.
But whoever controls the address range writes the PTR, and they can write anything. The check that gives it weight is forward confirmation: resolve the name the PTR gives, and see whether it resolves back to the address you started from. If it does, the operator controls both directions and the name means something. If it does not, the name is a claim.
This is not academic. Many mail servers reject or penalise senders whose reverse DNS is missing or does not forward-confirm.
What is not revealed
Worth being clear, because the map pin implies more than it delivers. An IP address does not give anyone your name, your street address, your device, or your browsing history. Your ISP holds the subscriber record linking an address to an account at a point in time, and in most jurisdictions releases it only under legal process.
What the address does do is act as a stable identifier across every site you visit, which combined with a rough location and your ISP is enough to correlate your activity between unrelated services. That is the real privacy consideration, and it is not solved by the city being inaccurate.
If you want to change what it shows
- A VPN replaces the address sites see with the provider's. Sites then see a datacenter address, which many treat with more suspicion — expect more CAPTCHAs.
- Tor goes further, but exit node addresses are published, so plenty of sites block them on sight.
- A proxy changes it for one application only, not the rest of your traffic.
- Nothing here hides your address from your ISP, who assigned it.
The What's My IP module shows your public address and separates the two categories: routing and registry facts on one side, geolocation estimates on the other, with a note when the sources disagree. It also checks the published Tor exit list and the cloud providers' own range files.