Guide
How to find a website's IP address
Resolve any domain to its IP address from Windows, macOS or Linux, understand why big sites hide behind CDN addresses, and check what an IP really belongs to.
On this page
Resolve a domain on your own computer
Every website's domain resolves to one or more IP addresses through DNS. You can do it yourself in one command:
- Windows:
nslookup example.comorping -n 1 example.com(PowerShell also hasResolve-DnsName example.com). - macOS / Linux:
dig +short A example.comfor IPv4 anddig +short AAAA example.comfor IPv6;ping -c 1 example.comworks too but sends extra traffic.
The returned numbers are the exact addresses your browser connects to. A site with several servers returns several A records — your client picks the best of them.
The CDN twist
For big sites — news outlets, shops, streaming platforms — the answer is rarely the website's own server. It is a content delivery network edge node (Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, CloudFront) chosen to be near you. That is why:
- the same domain resolves to different IPs in different countries, and sometimes different blocks of the same city;
- the address you find belongs to the CDN company, not the publisher;
- "anycast" networks serve one IP from many datacenters at once, so a single IP can be physically in several places.
Small personal sites and niche services usually resolve to the operator's own hosting address, which is stable and the same for everyone.
What does that IP belong to?
Once you have the address, paste it into the IP lookup tool. The ISP / organisation and ASN fields tell the story: AS13335 says Cloudflare, AS16509 says Amazon, AS15169 says Google, and a small regional ASN says a hosting company you can look up by name. That single step separates "this site is behind a CDN" from "this site is self-hosted" — see what an ASN is for how to read the numbers.
Reverse lookup — the other direction
The mirror operation maps an IP back to a name (a PTR record): dig -x 203.0.113.10. Results are hit-or-miss — well-run organisations set PTR records, but many do not, and the names are often internal labels like host-10.example.net. For ownership questions the WHOIS/RDAP records are far more useful than PTR.
Don't browse by raw IP. Modern TLS requires the browser to present the domain name it expects, so visiting http://203.0.113.10 instead of the site's domain usually fails with a certificate error. Resolve for analysis, browse by name.
Frequently asked questions
Why do I get a different IP for a site than my friend in another country?
CDNs and anycast networks return the nearest edge node to each visitor. For self-hosted small sites, everyone usually gets the same address.
Can I visit a website by typing its IP address?
Sometimes on plain HTTP, but most modern sites fail on a raw-IP visit because the TLS certificate only matches the domain name.
Is a site's IP address public information?
Yes — DNS resolution is public by design. What is not always obvious is whether the address belongs to the site's operator or to a CDN in front of it.
Keep reading
- What is an IP address?
- Public vs private IP addresses
- IPv4 vs IPv6
- How to hide your IP address
- How to check your IP address on a phone
- What is CGNAT?
- How to change your IP address
- Why does my IP address keep changing?
- What is a datacenter IP?
- IPv6 privacy extensions
- What is an ASN?
- How IP geolocation works
- What is a local IP address?
- Why am I getting blocked or stuck on CAPTCHAs?
- What is IP reputation?
- How websites detect VPNs and proxies
- What is a DNS leak?
- What is a WebRTC leak?
- Proxy vs VPN
- How to check if your VPN actually works
- Static vs dynamic public IP
- How to find out who owns an IP address
- IPv6 in 2026
- Check my public IP address
Check any other IP address
Investigating a suspicious login, a spam email header or a server log entry? Run any IPv4 or IPv6 address through the same geolocation and proxy checks.