How to Tell if an AirTag Is Tracking You

Open Dowse and look at what is broadcasting around you. Every Bluetooth device is named, trackers and beacons are flagged, and Tracker Watch keeps looking afterwards, so an unknown tag that follows you from your home to a shop to a friend's flat gets surfaced. On iPhone, cross-check with Find My, Items, Identify Found Item, which covers AirTags specifically. Together that is the two-minute answer.

The rest of this page is about the harder version of the question: what to do when the automatic alert stays silent and something is still there.

How to check, step by step

1. Scan the area with Dowse. Open Dowse and look at what is broadcasting around you. Every Bluetooth device is named from the official Bluetooth registry rather than shown as a raw code, and trackers and beacons are flagged.
2. Turn on Tracker Watch. Watch runs quietly in the background and notes trackers it cannot account for, so a device that appears near you in several unrelated places gets surfaced rather than missed.
3. Cross-check with Find My on iPhone. Open Find My, go to Items, then Identify Found Item. This searches for Find My accessories separated from their owner, which covers AirTags specifically.
4. Make the tracker play a sound. If a separated Find My tracker is located, Find My offers a play-sound option. A tag hidden in a bag or a wheel arch is far easier to locate by ear than by signal.
5. Hunt it down physically. Use Dowse's Hunt to walk the signal down. Pick the device and move, and Geiger-style clicks speed up as you close in until you are looking at it.
6. Leave it in place and report it. Photograph the tracker where it sits, read its NFC page if it is an AirTag, then contact the police. Destroying it removes the evidence of where it was planted and for how long.

Why the iPhone alert is sometimes slow, or silent

The warning you have read about is real, but narrower than most people assume. An AirTag only becomes findable by other people's phones once it enters separated mode, meaning it has been away from its owner's device for a stretch of time. If the person who planted it is in the same building, the tag is not separated and your phone has nothing to report.

The alerts are throttled on purpose too, to stop your phone screaming every time you sit near the same stranger on a commute. A tag that warned you last week may not warn you today. And on Android there is no background detection at all for Find My accessories.

So the built-in alert is a backstop, not a monitor. Dowse is the monitor.

The trackers iOS does not warn you about

Apple's item safety alerts were built around Find My accessories. Tile and Chipolo run their own networks and largely sit outside that system, so an iPhone will not raise them at all. They are cheap, widely sold, and an obvious choice for anyone who has read the same articles you have about AirTags being detectable.

Dowse does not care whose network a tracker belongs to. It scans Bluetooth directly and names what it finds from the official Bluetooth registry, so a Tile shows up as a Tile and a Chipolo as a Chipolo rather than as a hex code you would have to go and look up. Anything broadcasting nearby is listed, whoever made it.

Following you, or just nearby?

This is the distinction that makes tracker detection useful instead of frightening, and it is the part a one-off scan cannot give you. Your neighbour's speaker, the tag on your own keys, and the headphones of whoever sits opposite you every morning will all appear on any scan. None of them are following you.

What matters is the same unknown identifier turning up around you in places that have nothing to do with each other. One sighting is noise. The same anonymous tracker at your home, then at a shop across town, then at a friend's flat is a pattern, and a pattern is the only thing worth acting on.

That is precisely what Tracker Watch does. It notes trackers it cannot account for, keeps quiet about the ones that are obviously furniture, and tells you when one keeps reappearing across unrelated locations. Most days it says nothing at all, which is the correct output and the reason you can leave it on.

Finding the tag once you know it is there

Knowing a tracker exists is not the same as holding it. Dowse's Hunt turns the signal into something you can follow on foot: pick the device, start walking, and the number climbs as you close in while Geiger-style clicks speed up.

Two details matter here. Bluetooth signal strength swings about fifteen decibels on a device that is sitting perfectly still, so Dowse smooths the signal rather than rendering that noise raw, which is why other finder meters look broken. And it never shows you a distance in metres, because without a published transmit power any distance figure is fabricated. Strength rising as you approach is real. "Four metres away" is not.

If you find one

Leave it exactly where it is. Photograph it in position, including a wide shot showing where it was hidden, and if it is an AirTag hold your phone against it to read the NFC page, which shows a partial serial number. Then contact the police.

Placing a tracker on someone without consent is a criminal matter in most places, and the tracker itself is the evidence. Pulling it apart or throwing it away destroys the record of where it was and how long it had been there.

What a radio scan cannot tell you

Worth knowing so you read results correctly. A tracker only exists to any scanner while it is actively broadcasting, so one sitting dormant in a bag is invisible until it wakes. And a tracker is not the only way to follow someone: a phone left in a car, or account sharing set up while someone had your passcode, will never appear on any Bluetooth scan. Dowse tells you what it saw and what it could not check, so you always know which of those you are looking at.

Related

If your worry is a room rather than a bag, see how to check a hotel room or Airbnb for hidden cameras. If you are trying to find something of your own, see how to find lost Bluetooth headphones.

Common questions