The IP Animal Field Guide: A Tour of the Species

Grab your binoculars. This IP animal field guide is a friendly tour of the animal-themed IP checkers that roam the internet — the species, their habits, and the one number they all like to show you.

What counts as an IP animal?

An IP animal is our affectionate term for an animal-themed "what's my IP" website: a page that reads your public IP address and shows it back to you behind a friendly creature. The animal is the plumage; the behaviour underneath is the same across the whole family. If you have ever visited a page named after a chicken or a monkey just to check your address, you have already met one in the wild.

A quick note on method. This field guide is written the way a good naturalist writes — from observation, and with hedged language. The exact roster of these sites shifts over time, and reliable founding dates or ownership records rarely exist, so we describe the species and their general traits rather than inventing precise histories. Real animals like the chicken, monkey, cow, duck, and whale are fair game to mention; specific unverifiable claims are not.

The common species

Certain creatures turn up again and again in this habitat. Here is a general sketch of the ones you are most likely to encounter, with the caveat that individuals vary and come and go.

Do not treat this as a complete checklist. New species appear whenever someone builds a fresh page, which — as our guide on building your own IP checker shows — takes only a few lines of code. The family is open to newcomers.

Habitat and diet

Where do IP animals live? Their natural habitat is the static web page — lightweight, fast-loading, and cheap to keep alive. Many nest on simple static hosting and require almost no upkeep, which is why the hardier specimens survive for years untouched.

Their "diet," so to speak, is your incoming request. As our explainer on how an IP checker works describes, the animal either reads your public IP from the server connection or, if it is a static page, fetches it from a public IP API. Either way, it feeds on the one thing every visit provides: an address to display.

Markings and variations

Though the core behaviour is shared, individuals show small variations in their markings. Some IP animals display only the bare address. Others add extra readouts: an approximate location, an internet provider name, or a browser string.

A word of caution for the careful observer. The IP address itself is exact, but the location marking is an estimate drawn from geolocation databases and is often wrong, as our guide on IP geolocation explains. When field-noting a specimen, record the IP as fact and the trimmings as approximations.

Behaviour and temperament

IP animals are, on the whole, a gentle and cooperative family. They ask nothing of you — no login, no forms — and give their answer at a glance. This unfussy temperament is part of their appeal and a link back to the friendlier, handmade corner of the web where they evolved.

They are also remarkably long-lived when left alone. A static page has little to break, so a well-nested IP animal can outlast trends, browsers, and even its own creator's attention. That said, not every specimen endures, and our record of extinct IP websites memorialises the ones that have gone quiet.

Watching them in the wild

The best way to appreciate the family is to visit some. IP Animals gathers the genre into one friendly place so you can tour the species without wandering the whole internet — though we should be clear that we catalogue and celebrate these creatures rather than own them. Consider this guide a fan's field notebook, kept for the love of the subject.

If your curiosity runs deeper, the story of how the family first appeared is told in our look at old-school IP checkers, and the reason it grew so large is explored in why there are so many animal IP websites. Happy spotting.