The first thing anyone does with a new proxy is ask where it came out. Today we are giving that question a better answer: IP Info, a free IP geolocation API from Shifter. One request returns the country, city, coordinates, time zone, ISP, ASN and connection type of any public IP. No signup, no API key, no plan to outgrow, and you do not have to be a Shifter customer to use it.
curl http://ip-info.com/jsonThat is the entire integration.
One answer, from the network that routes you
Every IP lookup service runs on its own database, and the databases do not always agree. That is how a proxy set to Germany can come back as the Netherlands on one site and Belgium on another, and why “is my targeting broken?” is so often the wrong question. The real question is which database you are reading.
IP Info removes the guesswork. It runs on the same IP location and network database that Shifter uses for its own proxy pools. When you look up a Shifter exit, you see the country, city and network exactly as our infrastructure classifies them, the same data our country, city and ASN targeting is built on. There is no second opinion to reconcile.
Enterprise data, without the enterprise invoice
The data behind IP Info is not scraped or crowd-sourced. It is a licensed, commercial IP intelligence database, the kind multi-billion-dollar companies rely on for fraud prevention, localization, compliance and analytics, and it is updated daily by its provider. That grade of data normally sits behind a sales call and an annual contract. Here it sits behind a URL.
It is also deep. Every response carries 29 fields:
- Where: country and continent (codes and names), region, district, city, postal code, coordinates, time zone and EU membership
- Who: the ASN as a plain number, the AS name, the ISP and the organization using the IP
- What kind: connection type (Cable/DSL, Cellular, Corporate and more), user type (residential, business, cellular or hosting) and an anycast flag
- For your own joins: GeoNames IDs for the city, region, country and continent
Every field is present on every response. When the database has no value, you get null, never a guess, so your parser never has to branch on shape.
Free, and meant to stay that way
“Free” in this market usually means a trial key, a monthly cap and an upgrade screen waiting at the end of it. IP Info has none of that.
- No signup, no API key. Send a
GET. There is nothing else to set up. - No per-app quota. Use it from scripts, backends, CI checks and production products, commercial use included. It is a shared service, so the terms ask for reasonable use rather than a plan.
- HTTPS or plain HTTP, IPv4 or IPv6. HTTP works without a redirect, which keeps minimal clients and quick checks simple.
- Straight from the browser. Responses allow cross-origin
GET, so a web page can call it directly. - Nothing kept. The API stores no lookup history.
Built for AI agents
A growing share of web traffic now comes from AI agents, and an agent that browses or scrapes needs to know where its requests appear to originate. IP Info was designed so an agent can use it with no setup at all.
There is no key to store, no auth flow to explain and no MCP server to install: plain HTTP is enough. The service publishes llms.txt, a complete plain-text reference and an OpenAPI 3.1 schema, so pointing an agent at any of them teaches it the whole API. Responses are built to be read by a model: numeric ASNs, ISO country codes and explicit nulls leave nothing to invent.
One rule is worth handing to every agent: a call to /json describes the caller, and for an agent the caller is its server or its proxy, not the person it works for. To look up someone’s IP, give the agent that address and have it call /json?ip=ADDRESS. The agent page has instructions ready to paste, and our IP Info docs include a tool definition that drops into any function-calling setup.
Check your Shifter proxy in one line
For Shifter customers, the most direct use is confirming that your targeting landed. Send the request through your proxy and compare the answer with what you asked for:
curl --proxy http://p.shifter.io:443 \
--proxy-user "customer-USERNAME-country-us-city-new_york:PASSWORD" \
http://ip-info.com/jsonA real response, in full:
{
"ip": "67.84.10.10",
"city": "New York",
"city_geoname_id": 5128581,
"region": "New York",
"region_code": "NY",
"region_geoname_id": 5128638,
"district": null,
"district_code": null,
"district_geoname_id": null,
"country": "US",
"country_name": "United States",
"country_geoname_id": 6252001,
"is_eu": false,
"continent": "NA",
"continent_name": "North America",
"continent_geoname_id": 6255149,
"loc": "40.7128,-74.006",
"latitude": 40.7128,
"longitude": -74.006,
"postal": "10123",
"timezone": "America/New_York",
"weather_code": "USNY0998",
"asn": 6128,
"as_name": "Cablevision Systems Corp.",
"isp": "Cablevision Systems Corp.",
"org": "Optimum Online (Cablevision Systems)",
"connection_type": "Cable/DSL",
"user_type": "residential",
"is_anycast": false
}country should match the country you targeted, and asn should match the network if you used ASN targeting. user_type tells you what kind of network the exit sits on. Because IP Info and our pools read the same data, a match here means the exit is exactly where our network put it. If you ever see a mismatch, send us the IP and we will look into it.
We have also moved every code sample in our documentation and guides to IP Info, so anything you copy from a Shifter tutorial now checks against the same data our network uses.
What IP Info will not do
Knowing the limits is part of trusting the answer. IP geolocation is approximate: it points to an area, never a street address, and it never identifies a person. Connection type and user type are database classifications. They are useful context, but they are not VPN or proxy detection, and IP Info does not claim to be.
Start now
Open ip-info.com to look up your own IP or any other, read the API reference for every field and error code, or start from our IP Info guide with ready-to-run examples for Shifter proxies and AI agents.
And when the IP you want is one of ours, our residential proxies give you country, city and ASN targeting built on the same data.