IP Address Lookup

Enter an IPv4 or IPv6 address — or a domain, which will be resolved first — to see which country it is registered in, which network operator owns it, and what its reverse DNS says.

The network owner is usually the most useful field: it tells you whether an address belongs to a consumer ISP, a hosting provider, or a CDN, which is what you actually want to know when investigating traffic in a log file.

How it works

Every routable IP address belongs to an Autonomous System — a network under one operator's control, identified by an AS number. Address blocks are allocated by regional registries to those operators, and the mapping from address to AS to organisation is public.

That mapping is reliable. Geolocation is not. An IP has no inherent location; databases infer one from registry records and network measurement, which is why country-level accuracy is good and city-level is frequently wrong by hundreds of miles. This tool reports country and deliberately does not claim a city, because presenting one would imply a precision that does not exist.

Three things worth understanding:

• Hosting versus consumer. An address belonging to AWS, DigitalOcean or OVH is a server, not a person at home. In a log file that distinction usually matters more than the country — bot traffic comes from datacentres, and this tool flags them.
• CDN addresses are not the origin. If a domain resolves to Cloudflare or Fastly, you are seeing the edge, not the server actually hosting the site. The real origin is deliberately hidden.
• Reverse DNS is set by the address owner, not the registry, so it is a strong hint and not proof. A missing PTR is normal for consumer connections and unusual for a mail server.

A note on VPNs and mobile networks: both routinely present addresses registered far from the user. A mobile carrier may route an entire country's traffic through one city's gateway, and any VPN deliberately shows its exit node. Geolocation describes the address, never the person.

Frequently asked questions