Your public IP address is 216.73.216.195. It is a public IPv4 address, served by Amazon.com, Inc. (AS16509).
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What an IP Address Actually Tells People
An IP address is a numeric label assigned to a device or network so data can be routed to it. When you open a website, your request carries your public IP address so the server knows where to send the response. That is its whole purpose: routing, not identification.
Websites can use your IP to estimate your general location, usually at the city or region level rather than your street. They can also see your internet provider, detect your approximate time zone and remember your session. What they cannot see is your name, your exact address, your device files or your browsing history on other sites. An IP address is not a personal ID card, although it can become identifying when combined with other data.
Public vs Private IP Addresses
There are two kinds of IP address and only one of them is visible on the internet.
- Public IP: assigned to your network by your internet provider or hosting company. This is the address websites see, and it is usually shared by every device on your home or office network.
- Private IP: used inside your own network only, such as
192.168.1.20or10.0.0.5. Routers hand these out, and they are never routable on the public internet. - Loopback:
127.0.0.1(IPv4) or::1(IPv6) always means "this device". If you see it here, you are viewing the site from the server itself.
If the result above shows an address starting with 10., 172.16 to 172.31 or 192.168., the server is seeing a private address, which normally only happens on a local network or behind a misconfigured proxy.
IPv4 Details Explained
IPv4 is the original 32-bit format. The four dotted numbers are simply a readable version of one 32-bit integer, which is why every IPv4 address also has a decimal, hexadecimal and binary form. The class (A, B, C, D or E) comes from the first octet and is a legacy way of describing the size of the network block.
- Decimal: the same address as a single unsigned integer, useful in firewalls and databases.
- Hexadecimal and binary: the raw bit pattern, used when reading subnet masks and access rules.
- Reverse DNS: the
in-addr.arpaname used to look up the hostname that belongs to an address.
IPv6 Details Explained
IPv6 is 128 bits long, written as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits. The compressed form replaces one run of zero groups with ::, while the expanded form writes every group in full. The first 64 bits are the routing prefix that identifies the network, and the last 64 bits are the interface ID that identifies the device.
- Routing prefix: handed out by the ISP and used to reach your network.
- Interface ID: identifies the device inside that network.
- Embedded IPv4: addresses beginning
::ffff:carry an IPv4 address inside an IPv6 wrapper. - Reverse DNS: the
ip6.arpaname, written with the hexadecimal digits reversed.
Why Your IP Address Changes
- Dynamic addressing: most home connections receive a lease that expires after hours or days. Reconnecting or restarting the router often returns a different address.
- Mobile networks: phones frequently move between cell towers and gateways, so the public IP can change several times a day.
- VPN or proxy: traffic exits through the provider's server, so the website sees the provider's address instead of yours.
- Switching networks: coffee shop wifi, office wifi and home broadband all have different public addresses.
How to Hide or Change Your IP Address
A VPN routes your traffic through an encrypted tunnel and replaces your public IP with one of the provider's. A proxy does something similar for a single application, usually without encryption. Tor routes traffic through several relays for stronger anonymity at the cost of speed. Restarting your router may also work if your provider assigns dynamic addresses.
Changing your IP is useful for privacy and for testing how a site behaves for visitors in another region. It is not a substitute for account security, and it does not make you anonymous on its own: cookies, browser fingerprints and logged-in sessions can still identify you.
Does My IP Address Affect SEO?
For site owners, IP addresses matter indirectly. Search engines crawl from their own IP ranges, so blocking or rate-limiting an IP range can stop indexing. Geolocation is used to serve the correct language and currency, and a CDN relies on IP data to route visitors to the nearest edge server. A shared hosting IP is not a ranking penalty by itself, but a history of spam or malware on that IP can hurt a new site's start.
If you are debugging indexing or geo-targeting problems, check the response your server returns and verify that your CDN is forwarding the real visitor IP. A misconfigured proxy shows every visitor with the same address, which breaks rate limits, analytics and personalisation.
Privacy Note
Every view of this tool and every IP search is saved in our lookup log. We store the address shown, the time, your request address and your browser's user agent. The log is used for abuse prevention and to measure which lookups are useful, and it is not sold or shared. Location data for public addresses is requested from ipwho.is.