Every public-facing tool that says “your IP is X” is reading the same thing: the source IP of the TCP connection that hit the server. But what that IP means — who owns it, where it geolocates to, whether it's on a blocklist — depends on a chain of indirect signals.
The signal
What is My IP reads REMOTE_ADDR from the HTTP request. When you're behind a corporate proxy, CDN, or VPN, what you see is the IP of that hop, not your laptop.
The follow-on questions — whose ASN owns it, what city it geolocates to, is it on an email blocklist — come from IP Lookup and IP Blacklist Check. Both tools take any IP, not just yours.
Why your IP might surprise you
- A consumer VPN puts you on a shared IP with thousands of other users; reputation tools may flag it.
- Cellular carriers (CGNAT) hide millions of customers behind a few public IPs; the geolocation lands wherever the carrier provisions it, not where you live.
- Cloud-provider IPs (AWS, GCP, Azure) carry a different reputation than residential IPs — many sites block them as a bot-mitigation measure. Our Cloud Region Detector tells you whose cloud an IP belongs to.