IP address lookup

What an IP lookup tells you

Every public IP address belongs to a network, an autonomous system (AS) run by an internet provider, a hosting company or a large organisation, and is used in a place. An IP lookup reads both from a geolocation database: the country, the region and the city where the address is used, and the network’s name and AS number.

This is how websites guess where a visitor is, which is why a proxy’s location matters: a site sees the proxy’s address, not yours, and treats you as a visitor from the proxy’s country and city.

How accurate is IP geolocation?

The country is right for the vast majority of addresses. The region and city are an estimate: they are usually close for home and mobile connections, and can point to a provider’s main office or data centre instead of the user. No IP database knows a street address.

The data comes from DB-IP’s free IP to City Lite and IP to ASN Lite databases, updated every month. Commercial databases and the sites you visit may place the same address differently.

Private by design

Most IP lookup sites send the address you type to their server or to an API. This one does not: your browser downloads a small slice of the database (a few tens of kilobytes covering a range of addresses) and searches it itself. The address you typed never leaves your device.

Private addresses such as 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x belong to local networks, not to the internet, so they have no location to look up.

Checking a proxy’s location

To see where a proxy puts you, connect through it and press “My IP”: the result is the address and location websites now see. With Ludax Proxy you choose the exit country, state or city per request, and a lookup like this one confirms it.