What Is My IPv6 Address and How Do I Check It?

FindMyTeam April 11, 2026

A practical guide to checking your public IPv6 address, understanding why it may differ from IPv4, and spotting the most common IPv6 troubleshooting mistakes.

When people ask "what is my IPv6 address?", they usually mean one of two things:

Does my connection have a public IPv6 address at all?
Is a website actually seeing IPv6 when I visit it?

Those are not quite the same question.

You can have IPv6 enabled on a device and still reach a site over IPv4. You can also see a local IPv6 address on your machine that has nothing to do with what a website sees.

The quick way to check your IPv6

Open IP Lookup with no IP entered.

If your current session is reaching the site over IPv6, the result should show an IPv6 address. If it shows IPv4 instead, that session reached the site over IPv4.

That answer is more useful than hunting through network settings, because it reflects the address a website can actually see from that browser session.

Why your device can show IPv6 even when websites do not

This is the part that trips people up.

A device can have:

a link-local IPv6 address, used only on the local network
an internal or private-style IPv6 address, used inside a network design
a publicly routable IPv6 address, which is the one that matters for internet-facing checks

If you only see a local address and websites still report IPv4, that does not mean the checker is wrong. It usually means your outward path is still IPv4.

What counts as a "real" public IPv6 check

A useful IPv6 check should answer all of these:

is the visible address IPv6?
which ASN or network operator is announcing it?
does the ISP, carrier, or hosting label make sense?
does the location context look broadly right?

The IP itself is only the start. The ASN and network owner often explain much more.

Why your IPv6 address may change

People sometimes expect an IP address to be a stable identity token. That is a bad assumption with IPv6.

Many networks rotate or refresh visible IPv6 addresses. Some devices also use privacy-oriented addressing behavior, which means the exact address can change even though the user and network have not really changed in any meaningful way.

So if your IPv6 looks different from last week, that is not automatically a problem.

Common reasons you do not see IPv6

1. Your ISP or carrier has not enabled public IPv6 on that connection

This is still common in some regions and on some business or mobile plans.

2. Your router supports IPv6 badly, or not at all

The device may advertise partial IPv6 features while the internet path still falls back to IPv4.

3. The site or service you are testing prefers or only exposes IPv4

Not every destination handles dual-stack traffic the same way.

4. A VPN, proxy, or security product changes the path

Some VPNs tunnel only IPv4 by default. Others support dual-stack properly. If you are testing through a VPN, check both the visible IP and the network owner before you decide what is happening.

If that sounds familiar, read How to Check If Your VPN Is Working Properly.

IPv4 vs IPv6 in plain language

IPv4 and IPv6 are both internet addressing systems. The short version is:

IPv4 is the older format and still widely used
IPv6 is the newer format with a much larger address space
many networks run dual-stack, which means both can exist at the same time

For normal users, the important question is not "which one is better?" It is "which one is actually being used for this session?"

That is why a live external lookup is more practical than a theoretical network diagram.

A better troubleshooting flow

If you want to know whether your IPv6 setup is healthy, use this order:

Check your visible address in IP Lookup
Compare the result with the device or router view
Check whether a VPN or proxy is changing the path
Review the ASN and carrier details
If a domain is involved, inspect its AAAA record in Domain Lookup

That last step matters more than people think. A destination can have an IPv6 path on paper and still fail in practice if the DNS or delivery setup is wrong.

What if the IPv6 location looks wrong?

That is normal more often than people expect.

IP geolocation is usually a network-level estimate. It is not a street address. On top of that, IPv6 paths can sit behind large ISP, mobile, enterprise, or CDN footprints that blur the city-level result.

If the city is off but the ASN and provider still make sense, do not panic. Read:

What if a domain works on IPv4 but not IPv6?

That often points to DNS or delivery problems, not to a mystery inside your laptop.

The usual suspects are:

a broken AAAA record
a CDN or reverse proxy setup that is only half-finished
an origin server that listens correctly on IPv4 but not IPv6

If you are debugging that kind of issue, keep these open:

The short version

If you want to know your public IPv6 address, do not overcomplicate it. Check the address a website actually sees, not just the addresses listed in local network settings.

Then look at the network context around it: