Live AIS · AISStream · Digitraffic / Fintraffic, CC BY 4.0
Ships you can actually see,
explained properly.
Live AIS positions from a worldwide network of shore-based receivers, updated every minute. Coastal, not the whole ocean — the receivers only hear what is within VHF range. Everything we show carries the feed it came from and how old it is, and everything we cannot show, we say so.
Find a vessel
Search by name, MMSI, IMO number or call sign.
Loading positions…
Contacting the live feed…
Live feed unavailable.
This is a feed outage, not an empty sea. Vessels are almost certainly moving; we just cannot see them right now. The vessel index still works from our own store.
Positions: AISStream.io, falling back to Digitraffic / Fintraffic, CC BY 4.0 · Basemap © OpenStreetMap contributors, tiles by OpenFreeMap
Photo: Agata Samulska / Unsplash ·source · Unsplash License
Feed status
What we are holding right now
Read live from /api/status in your browser. If it says unavailable, our store is unreachable — it does not mean the sea is empty.
Vessels in store
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Distinct MMSIs we hold a static report for
Positions held
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Latest known position per vessel
Newest position
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Age of the freshest report in the store
Feed
Checking…
AISStream, fallback Digitraffic / Fintraffic (CC BY 4.0)
Fleet dashboard
What our receivers can hear right now
Vessels heard now
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In our current AIS snapshot, not a count of ships at sea
Under way
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Reporting 0.5 kn or more
Flag states
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Distinct registries among the top 25 we can read
Freshest fix
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Age of the newest position we hold
By ship-type category
Loading…Reading the live snapshot…
“Unknown” is normally the largest bar: ship type arrives in a separate AIS transmission sent only every few minutes, so a vessel that has just come into range has a position but no type yet. We show it at full size rather than dropping it.
Browse by category
Ship types
AIS carries a two-digit ship-and-cargo type set by the crew. We group the 99 codes into these categories, and every page states exactly which raw codes it covers.
- CargoDry bulk, container, general cargo and ro-ro ships.
- TankerCrude, product, chemical and gas carriers.
- PassengerFerries, cruise ships and passenger craft.
- FishingVessels reporting as engaged in fishing.
- Tug & towTugs, pushers and vessels engaged in towing.
- Pleasure craftPrivate recreational vessels.
- SailingVessels under sail.
- High-speed craftHSC and wing-in-ground craft.
- ServicePilot, SAR, port tender, dredging, law enforcement and similar.
- MilitaryVessels reporting a military or law-enforcement type.
- OtherTypes defined by the standard but outside the categories above.
- UnknownNo usable ship type reported.
Reference
What the data actually means
How AIS actually works
Every dot on a live map is a ship voluntarily broadcasting its own position over VHF radio, and a receiver close enough to hear it.
Reading an MMSI: what the nine digits mean
The first three digits of a ship's MMSI are its flag state — but only when the identity is a ship station in the first place.
AIS navigational status codes, all sixteen
Navigational status is a human-entered field, not a sensor reading — useful context, never evidence.
Coverage
What this site does not do
We run on terrestrial AIS only. That is VHF radio, and VHF stops at the horizon — roughly 20 to 40 nautical miles from a receiver. Our feeds are global in reach but only as good as that receiver network: dense around Europe, North America and East Asia, thin elsewhere, and effectively absent in mid-ocean. Outside the band a receiver covers we show nothing, because we know nothing.
We have no satellite AIS, no radar and no imagery. We cannot see vessels without a transponder, vessels with theirs switched off, or most small craft — and some feeds, Digitraffic among them, filter fishing vessels out at source. A ship missing from this map has very probably just sailed out of range, not gone dark.