Is My Real IP Address Still Showing?

If a site can still see the address your internet provider gave you, the tunnel is not carrying that particular traffic. The tunnel may be up; it may even be carrying everything else. The address case is narrow and specific, and it is worth treating on its own rather than as one line in a longer checklist.

It is also the leak people ask about most, and that is not an accident. “Hides your IP address” is the promise VPNs are sold on, and it happens to be the only part of the promise a person can check in one step.

Why this is the question everybody asks

It is the only claim in the marketing that is directly observable.

You cannot see whether a provider keeps logs. You cannot see what its encryption is doing. But you can load a page that reports the address it was contacted from, and compare it against what you saw a minute ago. One value, two readings, an immediate verdict.

That accessibility cuts both ways. Because it is easy to check, it becomes the thing people check — and a pass gets read as a general statement about privacy rather than the narrow fact it is. A correct exit address means your traffic to that destination went through the tunnel. It does not mean your name lookups did, nor your other address family, nor that you are unidentifiable to a site you are signed into.

“Your IP” is three values, and only one can leak

A connected device holds more than one address, and confusing them produces false alarms in both directions.

There is the private address on your local network, which is never visible to a website and whose presence in your own settings alarms nobody once they know that. There is the private address on the virtual interface the client created, which exists only inside the provider’s network. And there is the exit address, which belongs to the VPN server and is what a destination actually observes. The relationship between the three is set out in why a VPN gives you two IP addresses.

Only the third one is at stake here. A leak in this category means a destination saw the public address of your own connection instead of the server’s.

What actually causes the revert

Five situations account for nearly all of it, and they are distinguishable by their pattern.

The tunnel dropped and traffic carried on. The most consequential one, because it happens mid-session while you are doing something. When the virtual interface disappears, the original route becomes the best available path and the network stack uses it — correct behaviour for a general-purpose operating system, wrong outcome here. Preventing it is the entire job of a kill switch, and the reason it is implemented with firewall rules is that reacting after the drop is already too late.

Some traffic is routed outside the tunnel deliberately. Split tunnelling, per-app rules, or an exclusion added months ago and forgotten. The signature is selective: one application shows the real address while another shows the exit address, at the same moment.

A second interface is live. A laptop on Wi-Fi with an ethernet cable also plugged in, or a phone with mobile data active alongside Wi-Fi, can send traffic over a path the client is not managing. The signature here is intermittent — it changes as the operating system re-evaluates which interface is preferable.

An application has its own connection settings. A configured proxy, or software with its own networking that ignores the system routing table, arrives from wherever it chose to. The signature is that the same check gives different answers depending on where you run it.

The device is not inside the tunnel’s coverage. Running the VPN on a router covers devices behind it and nothing else; a guest on a different band, a device on a bypass rule, or the router’s own management traffic can all sit outside it. The differences are covered in why a router VPN behaves differently from an app.

Being certain rather than reassured

One page load in one browser is the weakest possible evidence, and it is what almost everyone relies on.

What raises confidence, in rough order of value:

1. Record a baseline with the tunnel down. Compare against a written value, not a remembered one. Consumer addresses change on their own, so a stale memory produces both false passes and false alarms.
2. Check from more than one application. If a browser and a second piece of software both report the exit address, per-app routing and application proxies are ruled out at once.
3. Provoke a disconnection. Drop the tunnel deliberately while a page is loading and watch whether traffic continues. It is the only way to learn what happens on failure, and that is the failure that matters most.
4. Check each device separately. Settings do not travel between them, and a phone is the device most likely to have a second live interface.

Reading the address, not just comparing it

The address itself tells you which network is carrying you, which is a stronger check than a mismatch.

An exit address whose ownership records point at a hosting or transit network is consistent with a VPN server. One whose records name a residential internet provider — especially yours — is not, even if the digits differ from what you noted earlier. This matters because a partial leak can produce an address that is not literally your own but still sits inside your provider’s network. Working out what a given address says about its operator is the subject of finding and reading your VPN’s exit address.

When the real address is not the thing that identified you

A confirmed pass here is compatible with being completely recognisable.

Sites identify returning visitors by cookies and stored sessions far more reliably than by address, and a signed-in account settles the question regardless of where the traffic came from. And a service can often tell that an address belongs to a VPN provider, which is information in itself — not a leak, just a property of the address you borrowed.

So the honest scope of this check is: did the traffic go through the tunnel. Worth verifying, and a smaller thing than the phrase “hide your IP” suggests.

If it fails

Establish first whether the tunnel is carrying default traffic at all, because an unrouted tunnel produces a perfect imitation of this leak while nothing has escaped anything — it was simply never in the path.

After that, work by pattern. Selective failure points at routing rules. Intermittent failure points at a second interface. Application-specific failure points at that application’s own settings. Failure that began at a drop points at the absence of enforcement on failure, which is a setting to turn on rather than a fault to diagnose.