No. Your IP address only roughly reflects geography: a site that sees it learns your general area, not your street or house number.
What solves it instead
- Look at what a site actually gets: our IP address tool shows your address and the area that goes with it.
- Check where you did share your address: order forms, account profiles and the location permission of your browser or phone tell a site far more than an IP address does.
- Someone threatens you with your IP address? They have your general area, not your front door. Report the threat to the platform where it happens, or to the police.
The facts
| About | Word for word from the source | Source, checked on |
|---|---|---|
| Who gives you your IP address | An IP address, also called Internet address, is assigned to your device by your Internet Service Provider. | support.google.com, |
| What a website learns from it | IP addresses are roughly based on geography. This means that any website you use, including google.com, may get some information about your general area. | support.google.com, |
| Can you browse without one? | The Internet doesn't work without IP addresses. When you use sites, apps, or services like Google, they can usually detect some information about your location. | support.google.com, |
| How EU law treats an IP address | Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers provided by their devices, applications, tools and protocols, such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers such as radio frequency identification tags. | eur-lex.europa.eu, |
What we measured ourselves
Sites see the address of your connection; with a VPN they see the server's. Our own checks on that, from the same runs:
We measure NordVPN ourselves: 100 valid runs on 25 days, from October 8, 2026 to November 1, 2026, each next to a run without VPN.
In 100 of 100 runs the exit address was in the chosen country, and in 100 of 100 the DNS answers came from the provider's own network. The tunnel offered no IPv6.
Measured twice a day from a Google Cloud data centre in Belgium with the provider's standard WireGuard configuration: this tests the network, not the app, and not a home connection. Download is the median over three test servers; connection time is the time to open a connection to three public DNS services. Our setup does not reliably go above about 1,000 Mbit/s, so faster runs count as ‘≥ 1 Gbit/s’. How we work · Raw data (CSV)
What a VPN does change
With a VPN, a site sees the IP address of the VPN server instead of yours, so the general area it learns is that of the server. That helps if you do not want sites to know your region at all. The VPN provider itself still sees your real address. Check when a VPN is worth paying for
Without a VPN
- Your devicehas a private address that only exists inside your home network
- Your routershares one public address between all devices behind it
- The website
Sees: that public address, and with it your internet provider and roughly where you are.
With a VPN
- Your devicehas a private address that only exists inside your home network
- Your routershares one public address between all devices behind itEncrypted tunnel
- VPN serverrun by the VPN provider
- The website
Sees: the address of the VPN server and the country registered for it, not yours.
What we did not check
3
- How precise the general area is for your connection: that differs per internet provider and per location database. Our IP tool shows what one database says for you.
- When an internet provider has to tell the police or a court which customer used an address: national law decides that, and we do not cover it here.
- The quotes come from Google's help page about location in Search; other services word it differently.
Next step
- Look at what a site actually gets: our IP address tool shows your address and the area that goes with it.
- What is my IP address?