MAC Address Lookup

Every network interface on every device ever made — Wi-Fi cards, Ethernet adapters, Bluetooth chips, and even virtual network interfaces — has a MAC (Media Access Control) address, a 48-bit identifier burned into the hardware by the manufacturer. The first 24 bits of that address are the OUI (Organizationally Unique Identifier), assigned by the IEEE Registration Authority to companies that manufacture networking hardware. The remaining 24 bits are assigned by the manufacturer itself, giving them a pool of about 16.7 million unique addresses per OUI before they need to request another one.\n\nThis tool looks up the OUI prefix of any MAC address you provide and returns the company name registered for it. If you see an unfamiliar device on your home network with a MAC address starting with 00:1A:2B, and the lookup says "Apple, Inc.", you have identified it as one of Apple\u0027s products. If you see an Ethernet frame in a packet capture with a source MAC starting with 3C:5A:B4, the lookup tells you it is a Google device. This is a basic but effective fingerprinting technique used in network diagnostics, device inventory, and security analysis — it does not identify the specific device model, just the manufacturer who owns that OUI block.\n\nThe lookup is performed server-side using the free macvendors.com API, which queries a regularly updated OUI database. No API key is required. The server acts as a relay: your MAC address is sent to our endpoint, forwarded to the upstream OUI API, and the result is returned. The upstream API is simple — a GET request to https://api.macvendors.com/XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX returns the vendor name as plain text, or a 404 if the OUI is unregistered.\n\nA note on privacy: the first 24 bits of a MAC address identify only the manufacturer, not the specific device, person, or location. The vendor name is public information published by IEEE and is not considered personally identifiable. However, sending a full MAC address (all 48 bits) to any external service does expose the complete unique identifier. If you are concerned about revealing the full MAC address of a specific device, you can truncate it to the first 6 hex digits (the OUI prefix) before looking it up — the vendor result will be identical. The full MAC is not logged or stored on our server.\n\nAn important limitation worth understanding: OUI assignments only cover unicast MAC addresses. Virtual machines and containers often generate randomised MAC addresses (locally administered addresses, indicated by the second-least-significant bit of the first byte being set to 1). These will not match any OUI entry. Similarly, MAC address randomisation — a privacy feature in modern mobile operating systems that rotates the Wi-Fi MAC address when scanning for networks — produces locally administered addresses that have no vendor mapping. If you see a lookup fail for a MAC address that starts with x2, x6, xA, or xE in the second hex digit of the first byte, it is likely a locally administered address with no OUI registration.