If your real public IP appeared above while you had a VPN active, your VPN is leaking. Pick the section for your browser and follow the steps.
Chrome has no built-in WebRTC toggle. Install the official "WebRTC Network Limiter" extension from the Chrome Web Store (made by Google) and set it to "Use default public and private interfaces." Or switch to a VPN with built-in WebRTC leak blocking (Mullvad, ProtonVPN, NordVPN, ExpressVPN all advertise it).
Type about:config in the address bar and accept the warning. Search for media.peerconnection.enabled and double-click to set it to false. This disables WebRTC entirely - video calls in Google Meet, WhatsApp Web, and Discord browser will stop working until you turn it back on.
Paste brave://settings/privacy into the address bar, scroll to "WebRTC IP handling policy," and change it to "Disable Non-Proxied UDP." Brave is the only major browser with this option in the UI, no extension required.
On macOS: Safari > Settings > Advanced > Show features for web developers > Feature Flags > disable WebRTC Platform UDP Sockets. On iOS: Settings > Safari > Advanced > Experimental Features > toggle WebRTC mDNS ICE candidates on.
If you need video calls to keep working, do not disable WebRTC - switch to a VPN that routes WebRTC traffic through the tunnel or blocks it at the OS level. Mullvad, ProtonVPN, NordVPN, and ExpressVPN all do this correctly. Many cheap and free VPNs do not.
Chrome replaces your real local IP with a hashed mDNS string like a1b2c3d4.local. This is a privacy feature added in Chrome 76 (2019) - the hash cannot be tracked back to your real network and does not help fingerprinting.