What is the difference between a public and a private IP address?
The address shown here is the public one the internet sees, normally assigned to your line by your provider. The 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x addresses in your device settings are private addresses used only inside your router and never travel across the internet. Every device behind the same router shares the same public address, so a phone and a laptop on your home Wi-Fi will both show the value above.
Does my IP address change?
Most home connections use dynamic addressing, so restarting the router, reconnecting the line, or a change on the provider's side can hand you a different address. Mobile networks can change it when you move between cells. Only a static IP option or a business line keeps it fixed. Keep that in mind before pasting the address into a firewall allow list — a dynamic address will eventually stop matching.
The country or city shown is wrong
Location comes from IP allocation data (a GeoIP database) and is an estimate, never street-level. Large ISPs and mobile carriers often map to a regional hub tens or hundreds of kilometres away from you. If you are on a VPN or proxy, the location of the exit server is what appears. Treat it as a rough region, not an address.
Why am I seeing an IPv6 address?
When your line, your browser and the destination all support IPv6, the connection prefers it. A long colon-separated value starting with something like "2400:" means you arrived over IPv6. To see your IPv4 address instead you would need to disable IPv6 or use an IPv4-only connection. IPv6 addresses are assigned per device, so two machines on the same line will show different values.
How do I check my own IP address?
Just open this page — the global IP address of the line you are using right now is shown at the top. Addresses such as 192.168.x.x, which you see in Windows' ipconfig or in your phone's Wi-Fi settings, are private IPs and are not the same as the global IP the internet sees. Use the global IP shown here when you register your address on a server's allow list or when you check whether a VPN is actually working.