VPN Detection Check

Check whether your connection appears to come from a VPN, proxy or hosting provider, and whether the tunnel is actually carrying your traffic. Detection works from the network your address belongs to, not from anything your device reports.

How detection actually works

There is no flag on a connection saying "this is a VPN". Detection is inference from several signals together: which autonomous system owns the address, whether that network is a hosting or datacenter operator rather than a consumer ISP, whether the range appears in published VPN exit lists, and whether the address behaves like shared infrastructure.

That is why results are probabilistic. A small self-hosted VPN on an unlisted address may not be detected at all, while a legitimate business connection on a hosting network can be flagged when no VPN is involved.

Confirming your VPN is genuinely working

Run this connected and disconnected, and compare more than one field. Your public address, the ISP or organisation, and the ASN should all change. Seeing your home ISP still named while the tunnel is up is a strong sign it is not carrying that traffic — though split tunnelling produces the same result deliberately, which is why the combination tells you more than any single field.

Four things are worth confirming rather than one: the address and organisation both change, no resolver belongs to your ISP, IPv6 is either absent or owned by the VPN, and traffic stops if the client is killed. A tunnel can be up and still leaking on any of the last three.

Why sites treat detected addresses differently

Streaming services, banks and retailers commonly restrict or challenge traffic from datacenter and known-VPN ranges, because those correlate with automation, fraud attempts and region circumvention. That is a statistical judgement about the address, not about you.

It is also why a VPN can make ordinary browsing worse: more CAPTCHAs, more blocked signups, occasional outright refusal. Switching to a different exit server in the same country often resolves it, because reputation attaches to specific ranges rather than to the provider as a whole.

What this check cannot tell you

It says nothing about whether your DNS is leaking, whether IPv6 is escaping the tunnel, or what happens in the moment the connection drops. Those are separate failures and each needs its own test — start with the DNS leak test, which is the one people most often assume is covered here and is not.