What is an IP address?

An Internet Protocol (IP) address is the unique number that gets assigned to your connected device. Every mobile phone, laptop, cable box, tablet, server, along with thousands of other types of devices that are connected to a computer network has one. Much like how a street address identifies where you live, an IP address functions as the identifying "street address" of the device, and allows companies to see where the device is located and route traffic to the nearest server for faster connections and lower latency.

IP Address Lookup

An IP address lookup determines the location of any IP address. The results provide quite a bit of information, including information the city, state/region, postal/zip code, country name, ISP, and time zone. Consequently, this data is used by various agencies to find the owner of an IPv4 or IPv6 address.

IP Address Results

When using an IP address lookup tool, users often think they are going to find the exact location of an IP address. This is simply not true. No IP address database can provide the exact physical address of an IP address location. At best, you'll get the exact city in which the user of the IP is located.

Only the Internet Service Provider (ISP) can provide an exact physical address of an IP. ISPs usually have logs of which user was assigned an IP at any given time. There are usually limits as to how long an ISP stores these records. However, without a police warrant, or some sort of legal document, the ISP is unlikely to turn over any information.