What this tool actually shows you
Give it an address, a list of hosts, or the output of a traceroute you already ran, and it looks up who was allocated each address and where that allocation was registered. The globe is the answer drawn; the table beside it is the same answer written down, and it always holds more than the globe can.
It cannot run a traceroute for you. Tracing a path needs raw sockets and sends packets to every machine along it, and a web page that did that on demand would be a free, anonymous probing service pointed at whoever you named. So run traceroute, tracert or mtr on your own machine, paste what it printed, and this maps it.
traceroute example.com | pbcopy — then paste it here.
Everything it queries is public and readable by anyone: DNS over HTTPS, Team Cymru's ASN zones, and the RDAP bootstrap. No packet from this tool reaches the hosts on your map.
Country centroids, not city pins
Every dot sits at the geographic centre of a country. It is not where the machine is, and this tool will not pretend otherwise. The country comes from the routing registry's allocation record for the address block — the same record that says AS15169 holds 8.8.8.0/24 — and a registry knows which country a block was assigned to, never which building it is plugged into.
That is a deliberate choice against the alternative. Geo-IP databases will happily give you a latitude and longitude to four decimal places for any address; those numbers are inferred, frequently wrong by a continent for anycast and carrier-grade NAT addresses, and they are the reason a default US centroid has repeatedly sent police to an unlucky farm in Kansas.
So the resolution here matches the evidence. A block allocated to a registrant in Germany puts its hop in Germany, and that claim can be checked against the registry by anybody who doubts it.
The practical consequence is that hops routinely share a dot. A route crossing one country five times is five hops at one coordinate — which is exactly why the globe groups them by default and the table lists every one.
What you can paste
In Hosts mode, one name, address or URL per line. Blank lines and lines beginning with # are ignored, and a repeated host is looked up once.
In traceroute mode it reads all three common dialects — GNU and BSD traceroute, Windows tracert, and mtr --report — line by line rather than by detecting a format first, because a detector has to be right about the whole document before it reads any of it.
Hops that went unanswered are kept as gaps rather than dropped, so the hop numbers you see here match the ones your terminal printed. A line reading * * *, ??? or "Request timed out" becomes a hop with no reply, not a missing row.
What each hop's status means
Six outcomes, kept apart because they are six different findings — and only some of them are worth trying again.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Located | The registry named a country for this address, and the hop is on the globe. |
| No country on file | The address was looked up and the network was named, but no registry said which country the block was allocated to. The hop is real and has nowhere to be drawn. |
| Private address | An address from a private or reserved range — your own router, or a carrier's internal network. No registry holds these, so there is nothing to look up. |
| No reply | Your traceroute printed no reply for this hop. Common and usually harmless: plenty of routers decline to answer. |
| Not resolved | A name that resolved to nothing, or a line this parser could not read an address out of. |
| Refused | The name resolved only to addresses this server refuses to reach — private ranges, link-local, or cloud metadata addresses. That guard is what stops the tool being used to look inside our own network. |
Every control, and when to reach for it
| Control | What it does | Reach for it when |
|---|---|---|
| Input | Chooses whether the box is read as one host per line or as printed traceroute output. | Always — it is chosen rather than guessed, so pasting a trace into Hosts mode reads nothing rather than reading it wrongly. |
| DNS resolver | Picks which public DoH resolver turns names into addresses. | You want a lookup you can reproduce with dig against the same resolver, or one resolver is answering differently from another. |
| Spin the globe | Turns the globe continuously. Dragging and the arrow keys work whether it is on or off. | Turn it off to hold one face still while you read it. |
| Draw the legs | Draws a curve from each place to the next, in route order. | You are following a path. Turn it off when you only want to see where the hops are. |
| Group by country | Collapses hops sharing an allocation country onto one dot, drawn larger the more hops it carries. | Leave it on. It is off only if you want one dot per hop and accept that same-country hops stack invisibly. |
The resolver control switches itself off when there is nothing to resolve. A traceroute that printed an address for every hop never needs a name looked up, so the setting would change nothing — and a live control that changes nothing is worse than one that says why.
Drawing the legs switches itself off when a route reaches fewer than two distinct places. An arc from a point to itself renders as a spike out of the globe that means nothing at all.
Grouping switches itself off when every located hop is already in a country of its own, because there is nothing left to collapse.
The ceilings, and why each one is there
Nothing here is truncated on your behalf. A route past a ceiling is refused with the reason, so you never receive a shorter path that still looks complete.
| Limit | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Routes per visitor | 15 / hour | One route is up to forty hops, and every located hop costs a reverse lookup, two Team Cymru queries and an RDAP request. |
| Routes per deployment | 60 / hour | The registries are free and meter by address — and the address they see is ours, shared by everyone here. Without this, one caller in a loop spends the hour for everybody. |
| Hops per trace | 40 | Past every default: traceroute and tracert stop at thirty. A longer paste is refused rather than cut short. |
| Hosts per list | 20 | A generous list, and still a bounded number of round trips per press. |
| Characters in the box | 8,000 | The box is never capped as you type. Silently truncating a pasted trace would make a shorter route that still looked complete. |
What people use it for
Explaining a slow connection. A traceroute full of numbers becomes a picture of a path that crosses an ocean twice, which is a far easier thing to show somebody than a column of round-trip times.
Checking who actually serves a name. Paste a list of your own hostnames and the table names the operator behind each one — which is how a CDN migration that half-finished, or a staging host still pointing at an old provider, becomes obvious.
Reading somebody else's traceroute. Support tickets arrive with terminal output pasted in; this turns it into hop-by-hop network ownership without asking the reporter to run anything else.