Every website on the internet is hosted on a server, and every server has a unique address known as an IP address - sort of like how every house has a unique street address. Your website also has a domain name, which is like the name of the house.
Sometimes, a website can be accessible by typing in either the domain name or the IP address into a web browser. Here's where canonicalization comes into play.
Canonicalization is the process of choosing the best URL when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people can type in www.example.com to get to a website, but they can also access it via example.com or http://example.com. The goal of canonicalization is to ensure that every resource on your website (each page, image, and so on) has a single, unique URL.
When it comes to IP Address Canonicalization, the goal is to ensure that your website is only accessible from one address—either the domain name or the IP address, but not both. This is important because search engines could view the site accessed via the domain name and the site accessed via the IP address as two different sites with duplicate content, which could hurt your search rankings.
In practice, the standard approach is to have the IP address redirect to the domain name. This way, whether someone types in your IP address or your domain name, they'll end up at the same place, and search engines will only see one version of your site.
