What your IP address actually reveals
Less than the scare stories say, more than nothing. Here is the honest middle.
Updated 2026-09-26
Every device on the internet has an address, the way every house has one. Sites you visit see it, because they have to send the page back somewhere. What it gives away is widely exaggerated in one direction and widely dismissed in the other.
What it does reveal
Roughly where you are. Usually your town or city, sometimes only the region. It comes from a database that maps address ranges to places, and it is often wrong by tens of miles. It is not your street.
Who your internet provider is. BT, Sky, Vodafone, whoever. This is accurate.
Whether you are on mobile data, a home line or a business connection. Also accurate.
A thread to pull. This is the part that matters. On its own an address is weak. Combined with everything else a site collects — your browser fingerprint, your login, a cookie set last year — it helps tie sessions together into one person over time.
What it does not reveal
Your name, your address or your identity. Your provider knows who had which address when. Nobody else does without a court order.
What you do on other sites. A site sees your address when you visit *it*. It does not see your history.
Anything precise. If a site knows your exact location, it is because you granted location permission in the browser, or because you told it. Not from the address.
Who sees it
The sites you visit. Every advert and tracker embedded in those sites. Your internet provider, who sees every site you connect to whether or not it sees the contents. Anyone running the network you are on.
What a VPN changes
Sites see the VPN server's address instead of yours, so the location and the provider they can infer belong to the server, not to you. Your own provider sees an encrypted connection to one address and stops being able to build a list of the sites you visit.
What it does not change: if you sign in to an account, the site knows exactly who you are regardless of the address. A VPN is not anonymity. It moves who can see what, which is a real and useful thing, and it is not the same thing.
You can see what the internet currently sees for you on our what is my IP address page, including whether you are coming through us right now.
See what the internet sees Free, and it needs no account.