How to Find the IP Address of a Website
Every website is reached through an IP address: before your browser can open example.com, it asks DNS which address the name points to. Finding that address takes a few seconds, either online or from the command line. Interpreting it is the part people get wrong — a site can have several addresses, the address you see may belong to a CDN rather than the site's server, and hundreds of sites can share one IP. This is the practical how-to; for the background on autonomous systems and what an address says about the network, see ASN and website IP address: what the check shows.
Method 1: an online lookup
Type the domain into the domain to IP lookup. It queries DNS for both record types and lists every address, not just one:
- A records — IPv4 addresses such as
203.0.113.10; - AAAA records — IPv6 addresses such as
2001:db8::10; - for each address — the TTL, reverse DNS (PTR), the network (ASN) and owner, the country, and a flag if the address belongs to a CDN or proxy.
An online check is the easiest option on a phone or a locked-down work computer, and it shows the answer of a public resolver rather than whatever your own network has cached.
Method 2: the command line
All desktop systems can do the same lookup without extra software.
| System | Command | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Windows (Command Prompt) | nslookup example.com | Built in. Shows both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses under "Addresses" |
| Windows (PowerShell) | Resolve-DnsName example.com | Shows the record type and TTL for each answer |
| macOS, Linux | dig example.com A +shortdig example.com AAAA +short | Built into macOS; on Linux it comes with the dnsutils or bind-utils package |
| macOS, Linux | host example.com | Short summary of IPv4, IPv6 and mail servers |
| Any | ping example.com | Prints one address it chose to contact |
Two useful variants: dig example.com @1.1.1.1 asks a specific public resolver instead of your default one, and dig example.com without +short shows the TTL and any CNAME the name passes through. If www.example.com and example.com are configured separately, check both — they can point to different places.
ping shows only one address even when the domain has several, and many servers and CDNs ignore ping requests, so "Request timed out" does not mean the site is down. Use it to confirm which address your machine is using right now, not to list all of them.Method 3: the browser's developer tools
If you want the exact address your browser connected to, open developer tools (F12), switch to the Network tab, reload the page and click the first request. In Chrome and Edge the Headers panel shows a Remote Address line with the IP and port. This is handy when DNS answers differ by location: it shows what your browser actually used.
A vs AAAA, and why you get several IPs
Getting more than one address back is normal. The usual reasons:
- IPv4 and IPv6. A site that supports IPv6 has both A and AAAA records. Devices with IPv6 connectivity usually prefer the AAAA address.
- Load balancing. Several A records point to different servers, and clients pick one (DNS round robin).
- CDN. Content delivery networks return a few addresses from their own network, routed to the edge location nearest the visitor.
- Geographic DNS. Large sites answer different regions with different addresses, so a lookup from Europe and one from Asia can both be correct and still differ.
The order of addresses can also change from one lookup to the next. None of this is a misconfiguration.
When the IP is a CDN or Cloudflare
If the owner column says Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront or a similar network, you are looking at the edge of a CDN or reverse proxy, not at the site's own server. Visitors connect to the CDN, and the CDN fetches the page from the origin server behind it. Hiding the origin is usually deliberate: it protects the server from DDoS attacks and from traffic that would bypass the proxy's filters. The lookup tells you which provider fronts the site, and that is as far as it should go — we do not help uncover someone else's hidden origin.
If the site is yours, you do not need DNS to find the origin: the address is in your hosting control panel, and in the Cloudflare DNS tab the proxied A record (orange cloud) contains it. On the server itself, a command such as curl -4 ifconfig.me prints the public IPv4 address. For how CDNs cache and serve pages, see CDN and caching.
Shared hosting: one IP, many sites
On shared hosting, dozens or hundreds of sites can live on a single IP. The web server tells them apart by the domain name in each request, which is why typing the IP into a browser usually opens a default page rather than the site you looked up. To see which other domains are known on an address, run a reverse IP lookup. Results depend on the data source and are rarely complete, and for CDN addresses the list is meaningless, because thousands of unrelated sites share them.
A shared IP is not an SEO problem by itself. What matters more is whether the address appears on spam blacklists, which mostly affects email — see why an IP is blacklisted and how to get it removed.
What to do with the address next
- Who runs the network: the ASN lookup shows the autonomous system and the organisation behind it — useful to tell a hosting company from a CDN or a cloud provider.
- Where it is: the IP geolocation tool shows the country and approximate city. Treat the city as an estimate; for CDN and anycast addresses it says little about where the server physically is.
- All DNS records at once: the DNS lookup shows A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS and TXT in one report; the record types are explained in checking domain DNS records.
- After a hosting move: if different people see different addresses, resolvers are still holding the old record until its TTL runs out — see how long DNS propagation takes.