How to check if your VPN is working

Open this page with the VPN off and note three things: the address, the country and the network provider. Turn the VPN on, come back here and reload the page fully with Ctrl+F5 (Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac). If the VPN is working, all three are different and the leak checks for WebRTC, IPv6 and time zone come back clean. If nothing changed, either the VPN had not finished connecting or you are looking at a cached copy of the page.

Updated 11 August 2026

What a working VPN actually changes

With a VPN on, your browser no longer talks to a website directly. It talks to a server in between, and the site sees that server's address instead of the one your internet provider gave you.

So a proper test is not about one number. Four things have to line up:

• the address the site sees, which should belong to the VPN server and not to you
• the network provider behind that address, which should be the hosting company running the server, not your home or mobile operator
• WebRTC, a browser feature that can report your real address to a page by itself, outside the VPN connection
• IPv6, a second and newer address your connection may also have, which some setups leave outside the VPN

It is worth being clear about what this gives you. The sites you open see the server instead of you. That is not invisibility: your internet provider can still see that you are connected to a server, and anything you log into still knows exactly who you are.

Test it step by step

1. Turn the VPN off. Open this page and note three values: the address, the country and the network provider.
2. Turn the VPN on and wait until it says the connection is up. A few seconds is normal.
3. Come back to this page and force a full reload – Ctrl+F5 on Windows and Linux, Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac. An ordinary reload can quietly show you the old result from cache.
4. Compare the three values with what you wrote down. All of them should be different now.
5. Look at the leak checks further down the page: WebRTC, IPv6 and time zone.
6. Do the same once in a private window and once in a different browser. That tells you whether the VPN covers the whole computer or only the browser it is installed in.

If you want to be thorough, run the test again an hour later. A VPN connection can drop while the internet keeps working, and nothing on screen tells you.

What each result means

• Address and country changed – the site now sees the VPN server. This is the main sign that it works.
• Network provider changed – the line names a hosting company instead of your home or mobile operator. If your operator is still there, your traffic is leaving the old way.
• WebRTC leak: none – the browser is not handing out a second address on the side.
• WebRTC leak found – this page received an address that came from outside the VPN. Any other site can read the same thing.
• IPv6: none – only the older IPv4 address is in use, so there is nothing to leak.
• IPv6 shown and it is not the server's – some of your traffic is leaving outside the VPN.
• Time zone matches the country – nothing stands out. A mismatch is not a leak; it only makes it obvious that your address and your computer clock belong to different places.

The VPN is on but my IP has not changed

This is the most common complaint, and the reason is usually dull rather than dramatic.

• The page came from cache. Force a full reload with Ctrl+F5 or Cmd+Shift+R, or open the page in a private window.
• The VPN had not finished connecting. The switch says on, but the connection is not up yet. Turn it off and on again, wait for it to say connected, then reload.
• It is a browser extension. An extension covers its own browser and nothing else – other browsers and other programs keep using the normal connection.
• The site is on an exclusion list. Many VPNs let you list sites that stay outside the connection, and some arrive with entries already on that list.
• The server is in your own country. The country line looks unchanged, but the address and the network provider still change – check those instead.
• The site worked out where you are some other way – the browser location prompt, or an address saved in your account. Neither has anything to do with your IP, and a VPN will not change them.

The country is not the one I picked

Address databases, ours included, go by where an address is registered, not by where the hardware physically sits. A range of addresses registered to a company in one country can be in use on machines in another, and ranges change owners regularly, so a recently transferred one can stay listed under its previous owner for weeks.

Some apps also move you to a nearby server when the one you picked is busy, without saying much about it. If both the address and the network provider changed, the VPN is doing its job even when the flag is not the one you expected.

A check found a leak – what to do

• WebRTC. Look for a setting in your VPN that blocks it, or turn WebRTC off in the browser. Reload this page afterwards and check again – the result should read as none.
• IPv6. Either your VPN handles IPv6 or it does not. If it does not, you can switch IPv6 off in your network adapter settings, or use software that covers it.
• Time zone. Nothing stops working because of a mismatch. If you want it gone, set your computer clock to the time zone of the country you connect through.

Run the whole test again after each change. Fixing one leak does not touch the others, and it is easy to assume a setting took effect when it did not.

What this check does not tell you

The test above answers one question: which address the sites you open can see. It says nothing about the rest, and it is worth knowing where the line is.

• Your internet provider can still see that you are connected to a server, even if not what goes through it.
• Accounts, cookies and saved logins identify you whichever address you arrive from.
• Browsers differ in fonts, screen size and settings, and that combination alone says a fair amount about who is visiting.
• Whoever runs the VPN server sees the traffic your provider no longer does. You are choosing who to trust with it, not removing the question.

How this page gets its answer: everything is worked out on our own servers from local databases. Your address is used to build the reply and is not stored, and there are no third-party trackers and no ads. If you would rather check from a script, api.ipgeo.ru returns the address and country in machine-readable form – no keys, no sign-up.