About IP Address Information Lookup
IP Address Information Lookup resolves a public IPv4 or IPv6 address to the record a GeoIP database holds for it: country and subdivision, city and postal code, time zone, coordinates with an accuracy radius, the covering network prefix, and the ASN with its registered organisation. You can paste up to 100 addresses at once and the tool resolves them in parallel.
A GeoIP result describes a block of addresses, not a person. These databases are assembled from registry allocations, routing announcements, operator geofeeds, and inference, then republished on a weekly or monthly cycle. That is why the country is usually right and the street-level coordinate never is: the latitude and longitude are the centre of an estimated area, which is exactly why the record carries an accuracy radius in kilometres. An address only records where traffic left a network, so a VPN exit, a carrier's NAT pool, or a cloud load balancer answers with its own position rather than the user's.
How to use this developer tool
- Paste one address per line, or separate them with commas; exact duplicates are removed before the batch runs.
- Start the lookup and watch each row resolve — eight addresses run concurrently, so a list of 100 finishes in seconds.
- Open a row's details and read the network prefix, ASN, and organisation alongside the city rather than judging the result from the city alone.
- Check the accuracy radius before quoting a city: 50 km makes it a fair guess, 1000 km means the database only really knows the country.
- Copy the successful or the failed addresses as a list when you need to feed one group into another tool or retry the rest later.
Worked example: a batch with one public and one internal address
The batch accepts whatever you paste out of a log file, including the RFC 1918 addresses that always get mixed in. Public addresses get a full record; internal ones are labelled by scope rather than given an invented location.
203.0.113.45
192.168.1.10203.0.113.45 — success
Location Frankfurt · Hesse · Germany (DE)
Network 203.0.113.0/24
ASN AS64500 · Example Transit AB
City / postal Frankfurt · 60313
Time zone Europe/Berlin
Coordinates 50.1109, 8.6821 · accuracy radius about 50 km
192.168.1.10 — internal address
This address is not part of the public internet.
Address type: privateBoth addresses come from ranges reserved for documentation, and AS64500 is from the documentation ASN block, so they show the shape of a real answer rather than a real operator's record. Read the accuracy radius first: at 50 km the city is plausible, at 1000 km it is the country wearing a city's name.
Ranges that never carry a public location
When the lookup marks an address as internal it names the scope instead of returning geography. These are the ranges that trigger it.
| Range | Scope reported | Why there is no location |
|---|---|---|
| 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12, 192.168.0.0/16 | private | RFC 1918 space, reused inside millions of separate networks. |
| 100.64.0.0/10 | private | Carrier-grade NAT space between a subscriber and the carrier's public pool. |
| fc00::/7 | private | IPv6 unique local addresses, the direct equivalent of RFC 1918. |
| 127.0.0.0/8, ::1 | loopback | Traffic never leaves the host, so no network announces it. |
| 169.254.0.0/16, fe80::/10 | link-local | Valid on one link only; assigned by autoconfiguration or when DHCP fails. |
| 224.0.0.0/4, ff00::/8 | multicast | Group destinations rather than endpoints. |
| 0.0.0.0, :: | unspecified | Placeholders meaning "no address" in a socket API. |
Troubleshooting
The city is wrong and names the town where the hosting provider is registered.
Why it happens Many providers publish one location for an entire prefix, or the database holds only the registry record for the allocation. A server in Warsaw inside a prefix registered in Amsterdam reports Amsterdam.
Fix Read the ASN and organisation instead — those come from routing data and are far more reliable — and treat the city as a hint. For infrastructure addresses the organisation name is usually the answer you wanted.
A mobile address resolves hundreds of kilometres from the handset.
Why it happens Carrier-grade NAT means thousands of subscribers share one public address, and carriers frequently anchor a whole pool to a single gateway site. The answer describes the gateway.
Fix Expect country-level accuracy on carrier networks and nothing finer. If you are diagnosing your own connection, IP Network Check shows what your browser presents on each family.
The same device produces a different IPv6 address on every lookup.
Why it happens IPv6 privacy extensions rotate the interface identifier on a timer, so the last 64 bits change while the delegated prefix stays the same.
Fix Compare the network prefix, not the full address. Two addresses inside the same /64 are the same subscriber line, and the network field is the part worth logging.
The batch stops returning results partway through.
Why it happens The allowance of 1000 lookups per visiting IP per UTC day is counted per address, and an office or NAT connection spends it collectively.
Fix Copy the failed list, wait for the UTC day to roll over, and re-run only that list. The tool removes exact duplicates but not two spellings of the same IPv6 address.
When this tool is the right choice
- Turning a column of addresses from an access log into countries and networks you can group and count.
- Finding which operator announces a prefix before you write a firewall rule or send an abuse report.
- Telling a hosting provider apart from a consumer ISP, which the ASN organisation usually makes obvious.
- Separating genuine public addresses from the RFC 1918 noise in a pasted log extract.
When to use something else
- Finding your own address or checking whether your connection is dual-stack. IP Network Check probes both families directly from this browser.
- Checking whether your browser, VPN, or DNS resolver exposes a path you did not expect. Browser Leak Check gathers WebRTC candidates and resolver signals locally.
- Identifying a person, a household, or a postal address. No IP database can do this, and a result that looks precise is only precise about an estimate.
Privacy and data handling
Every address you submit is sent to this site's server, which performs the GeoIP lookup and returns the record. Addresses and results are not assembled into a profile, but the request passes through this site's server logs and its upstream data source under their published policies. The lookup is limited to 1000 addresses per visiting IP per UTC day, counted per address rather than per submission, so a 100-line batch spends 100 of that allowance. Never paste account identifiers, customer names, or session tokens that happen to sit next to an address in your logs.
Related developer tools
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is the location, honestly?
Country is correct for the large majority of public addresses. Region is materially less reliable, and city is a guess whose quality you can read off the accuracy radius — that number is the tool telling you how large a circle it needs in order to be right. Coordinates are never an address.
What is the difference between the ASN and the organisation name?
The ASN is the routing identity of the network announcing the prefix, assigned by a regional registry; the organisation is the name registered against it. Resellers, cloud tenants, and transit providers sit in between often enough that the organisation means the network carrying the traffic, not necessarily the company billing the subscriber.
Can I look up a private address?
You can submit one and the tool identifies it, but it reports the scope — private, loopback, link-local, multicast, or unspecified — instead of a location. Those ranges exist in millions of networks at once, so there is nothing to geolocate.
Why do two lookup services disagree?
They license different databases, refresh on different schedules, and resolve ambiguity differently. A prefix that changed hands last month may still be described the old way by one of them. Agreement on country with disagreement on city is the expected level of precision.
How many addresses can I check?
Up to 100 per submission, resolved eight at a time, and up to 1000 addresses per visiting IP per UTC day. The limit counts addresses rather than clicks, so one full batch consumes a tenth of the day's allowance.
Does a lookup notify the address owner?
No. It reads a database on this site's server and sends no packet to the address you typed, so the owner learns nothing. That is also why a result can be stale: nothing about the address is measured live.
Is an IP address personal data?
In several jurisdictions, including under the GDPR, a public IP address counts as personal data once it can be combined with other information to identify someone. Handle such lookups the way you handle other log data, and never paste them next to names or account identifiers.