What this tool does
This tool shows your public IP address as your browser's connection to this server actually appears — detected entirely server-side by PHP reading the raw TCP/TLS connection, not by a third-party JavaScript beacon calling out to an external "what's my IP" service on page load. It also looks up the reverse DNS (PTR) record for that address, parses your browser and operating system from your User-Agent string, shows a curated set of HTTP request headers seen by this server, and — via a third-party geolocation lookup, described below — an approximate location.
Why "your IP" isn't always a simple question
If this site sits behind a reverse proxy or CDN, the raw TCP connection this server sees may belong to that proxy, not to you directly — the proxy is expected to forward your real address in a header instead. The trouble is that an HTTP header is just text a client can set to anything at all; treating a forwarded-IP header as authoritative without knowing who actually set it is how IP-based access control gets bypassed. This tool only trusts a forwarded header (specifically Cloudflare's own CF-Connecting-IP) when the raw connection itself is confirmed to be coming from one of Cloudflare's own published edge IP ranges — because Cloudflare's edge is what strips and overwrites any client-supplied copy of that header before forwarding the request. If the raw connection isn't from a Cloudflare edge address, the forwarded header (if any is present at all) is still shown for transparency, but is explicitly labeled as not trusted, and this tool falls back to the raw connection address instead.
Reverse DNS (PTR records)
A PTR record maps an IP address back to a hostname — the reverse of the usual A/AAAA lookup. It's looked up at a special name derived from the address itself: for IPv4, the four octets reversed with .in-addr.arpa appended (RFC 1035 §3.5); for IPv6, all 32 hex nibbles reversed with .ip6.arpa appended (RFC 3596). Not every IP address has a PTR record configured — many residential and mobile connections don't — so an empty result here is normal, not an error.
About the location lookup
The approximate-location data on this page comes from a third-party IP geolocation API, queried directly from your browser (not proxied through this server) — meaning that service receives your IP address directly, the same way any site you visit does when it tries to guess your region. IP-based geolocation is inherently approximate: it reflects where your IP address is registered or where your ISP/VPN exit point is, which is often a different city — sometimes a different country — from your actual physical location.
Frequently asked questions
Why does this show a different IP than another "what's my IP" site?
Most such tools detect your IP purely from the incoming connection, the same way this tool's fallback does — differences usually come from which forwarded-IP header (if any) a given site chooses to trust, or from your connection genuinely routing differently to different servers (e.g. through a VPN, or a CDN with multiple edge locations).
The reverse DNS lookup came back empty. Is that a problem?
No — a PTR record is optional. Many ISPs (especially for residential and mobile connections) don't configure one at all. An empty result just means none is published for your address, not that something is misconfigured.
Why does the location look wrong?
IP geolocation maps an address to where it's registered or where your connection's exit point is — not your literal physical location. This is especially true behind a VPN, corporate network, or mobile carrier, where the shown location can be an entire country away from where you actually are.
Do you log or store my IP address?
This tool's application code does not persist your IP address — it's detected on this single page load and shown to you directly, with nothing written to a database or file by this tool itself. Standard server or CDN access logging, if enabled by the hosting infrastructure, is separate from this tool and outside what its own code controls. The third-party reverse-DNS and geolocation lookups this page makes do receive your IP (any DNS resolver or geolocation service has to, in order to answer), the same as any other site or tool that performs those lookups.
Last reviewed: . Methodology: your IP is detected server-side from the raw TCP/TLS connection (REMOTE_ADDR), with a CF-Connecting-IP forwarded header trusted only when that raw connection address is verified against Cloudflare's own published edge IP ranges (cloudflare.com/ips-v4 and /ips-v6, checked 2026-08-08) — CIDR matching is done at the binary level via PHP's inet_pton(), verified against Python's ipaddress module on 640 cross-check vectors including Cloudflare's own non-byte-aligned prefixes. Reverse DNS is queried client-side over DNS-over-HTTPS using Cloudflare's resolver — the same DoH infrastructure this site's DNS Record Lookup tool uses for Cloudflare specifically (this tool only queries Cloudflare, not Google, for the PTR lookup). Geolocation is queried client-side, directly from your browser, via a third-party IP geolocation API — see the section above for what that means for your privacy. Browser/OS parsing covers common cases via straightforward pattern matching, not an exhaustive device database.