“What is my IP” is one of the most competitive informational queries on the web. The top three results are sites that have been running for over a decade, each sitting on hundreds of thousands of backlinks. If you build a new IP lookup tool and go after that head term directly, you’ll spend years waiting for results that probably won’t come.
So we didn’t do that.
The long-tail is underserved
The head term hides dozens of distinct user intents. We mapped them into three layers and built a page for each.
Tools — things people actually want to do: look up any IP address, check if they’re behind a VPN, run a DNS leak test, identify their ISP and ASN, check if their IP is blacklisted. Each is a standalone page targeting a specific query with its own search volume.
Country pages — /ip-location/china, /ip-location/japan, /ip-location/germany and 13 others. Users searching “what is my IP in [country]” or “IP location [country]” have different phrasing but the same intent. These pages capture that surface area.
Educational content — what is a VPN, dynamic vs static IP, how accurate is IP geolocation, the risks of free VPNs. These rank for informational queries and funnel readers toward the tools.
Incumbents tend to handle all of this on one cluttered page. We gave each intent its own URL, its own title tag, its own structured data. All of them cross-link back to the hub. Long-tail pages accumulate authority and funnel it upward — it’s slower than being handed traffic on day one, but it compounds.
Then there’s localization. The same three-layer structure exists in eight languages: Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, German, French, Japanese, Swedish, Polish. That’s not a translation project — it’s the same SEO thesis applied to search markets where the competition is even softer than it is in English.
Performance as a competitive moat
The other weakness of established players: they’re covered in ads, popups, and third-party scripts. That’s their revenue model, but it’s also a technical liability.
The ipchu.com homepage transfers 3.4 KB of HTML (gzip). First paint requires one HTTP request. There’s no client-side JavaScript fetching your IP after the page loads.
How: Astro SSR deployed on Cloudflare Pages. Every request is handled at the edge node closest to the visitor. Cloudflare’s request.cf object already contains the visitor’s IP, location, ISP, and ASN data at the time the request arrives — that data gets rendered directly into the HTML before it’s sent. The user receives a document with their IP already in it.
Google’s Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal. More practically: showing someone their IP address the instant the page loads is the most basic version of doing your job. Both things reinforce each other.
No database required — mostly
Most tools in this space call a third-party IP geolocation API (ipinfo.io, MaxMind). That means per-request costs, rate limits, and a hard dependency on someone else’s uptime and data quality.
For the main use case — showing a visitor their own IP — we don’t call any of them. Cloudflare already knows exactly where a request is coming from — city, region, country, ASN, ISP — and makes that available in request.cf at the moment the request arrives at the edge. We read it directly, render it into the HTML, and ship the response. No outbound API call, no database lookup, no extra latency. The free /api/ip endpoint works the same way, which is why we can offer it without rate limits.
The ip-lookup tool is a different story. Looking up an arbitrary IP address requires an actual database query — you can’t ask Cloudflare about someone else’s IP. We currently call ip-api.com’s free tier for this. It works, but it comes with rate limits and no SLA. If /ip-lookup sees meaningful traffic, this will become a problem. We have a self-built Rust service ready that queries an IP database directly — the migration path exists, it just hasn’t been necessary yet.
The free API as a growth mechanic
/api/ip returns the caller’s IP and geolocation as JSON, no auth required:
curl -L ipchu.com/api/ipThis isn’t just a feature — it’s a distribution strategy. Developers who use an API in their own projects tend to reference it in their code, their READMEs, their blog posts. Those references become backlinks. This is how ipinfo.io built its domain authority before it was a household name in developer tooling.
We deliberately keep the API frictionless. No key, no sign-up, no rate limit at reasonable volume. The barrier to starting to use it is zero.
Where monetization sits
High-intent long-tail pages are the natural monetization point.
A visitor on /am-i-using-vpn is already thinking about whether they need a VPN. A visitor on /hide-my-ip is actively looking for a privacy solution. VPN affiliate placements on those pages are useful, not intrusive — they’re answering the next question the user was going to ask anyway.
Putting ads on the homepage would be exactly wrong. Those visitors just want to know their IP. They’re not in a buying frame of mind, and cluttering that experience undermines the performance advantage the whole strategy depends on.
Where we are
ipchu.com is still climbing. Domain authority accumulates slowly, and several long-tail terms are ranking but not yet where we want them. This kind of project runs on a different clock than a product launch — you build it right, then you wait, then you keep adding content.
The experiment we’re running is whether technical quality and content depth can crack a market that incumbents have owned for a decade. The answer takes time to reveal itself. We think the conditions are right.