Built for everyone who's ever asked "what's my IP?"

Our story

The project started in 2024 as a side experiment. The founder, a self-taught web developer, kept getting the same question from family members working from home during the shift to remote work: "My internet is slow — what's my IP, and is somebody using my Wi-Fi?" The existing answers online were either gated behind shady "speed booster" downloads or buried under dozens of ads and tracking scripts. We thought a small, fast, honest tool — paired with patient explainers — could fill that gap. Two years later, the site receives traffic from more than 90 countries and the blog has grown into a small but carefully maintained reference on consumer networking topics.

Today WhatIsMyIP.live is still operated by a single full-time maintainer with help from freelance contributors who specialize in network engineering and privacy law. We are not affiliated with any VPN provider, ISP, or hosting company, and we don't accept paid placements inside our guides. The site is funded by display advertising and, in the future, by clearly labeled affiliate links to products we have personally tested.

Every article on this site is written or commissioned by a named human author and reviewed by a second contributor before it goes live. We follow a short, strict set of rules to keep the content honest:

• Primary sources first. Technical claims are cited against IETF RFCs, vendor documentation (Microsoft, Apple, Cloudflare, Mozilla), or peer-reviewed research — not against other content blogs.
• No AI-generated filler. We use AI tools to brainstorm outlines and check grammar, but every published paragraph is rewritten, fact-checked, and signed by a human contributor.
• Updates are dated. When a guide changes because the underlying technology changed — IPv6 adoption numbers, a new Windows network UI, a deprecated protocol — we update the publish date and add a note explaining what changed.
• Corrections are visible. If we get something wrong, we add a "Correction" line at the top of the affected article rather than silently editing the text.
• No paid reviews. Sponsored posts, paid links inside body copy, and "review" articles paid for by the product's vendor are not allowed on this site, ever.

When you load the homepage, your browser makes a single HTTPS request to a public IP geolocation API. The API responds with your public IP address — the one your router presents to the wider internet — along with approximate location data derived from the IP block registration, your ISP's organization name, and your timezone. That response is rendered directly in your browser; it never passes through our servers, and we keep no record of which addresses queried the page.

Geolocation accuracy varies. City-level results are usually within 25–50 km for residential connections in well-mapped countries, but they can be hundreds of kilometers off for mobile carriers, satellite links (Starlink in particular), business connections, and VPN exit nodes. If you're using a VPN, the location you see is the VPN server's location — that's how you can quickly verify the VPN is actually working. We explain the limits of IP geolocation in more depth in our geolocation guide.

The blog is the heart of the site. It's organized around the practical questions a non-specialist asks once they start poking at their network: what is the difference between a public and private IP, do I need a VPN, why does my IP look different on my phone than on my laptop, what is IPv6 and does it matter to me? Each guide is at least 1,200 words, opens with a one-paragraph summary, and ends with a short FAQ that targets the follow-up questions readers actually ask in support forums.

We publish one or two new articles a month and continuously revise older ones. If you want a topic covered — or you spotted a factual error in something we've already written — please write in.

Advertising and funding

WhatIsMyIP.live is free, and it stays free because of display ads. Ads are clearly labeled and never inserted into the middle of a sentence or styled to look like article content. We do not allow advertisers to influence which topics we cover or what we recommend, and we do not run ads from companies whose business model conflicts with the privacy advice in our guides — for example, data brokers or grey-market "IP lookup" services that publish personal information.