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Cargo
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A live ship tracker that plots cargo ships, tankers, ferries and other vessels worldwide on an interactive 3-D map. Positions come straight from live AIS broadcasts, so the marine traffic map above updates in real time. Explore the full-screen map, then scroll for how it works.
This vessel tracker map renders thousands of ships as they move across the world's oceans, seas and busy shipping lanes. Each marker is a real vessel reporting its own position over AIS — colour-coded by type, with recent track history so you can see where a ship has been and where it is heading. Zoom into chokepoints like the Strait of Malacca, the Suez and Panama canals, the English Channel or the approaches to Shanghai and Rotterdam to watch global trade flow in real time.
AIS stands for Automatic Identification System. It is a VHF radio transponder that most commercial ships over 300 gross tons, all passenger vessels and many smaller craft are required to carry. Each transponder continuously broadcasts the vessel's identity (MMSI and name), position, course, speed and navigational status. Coastal receivers and satellites pick up these messages, and this map streams them live so the AIS ship map you see reflects the real position of each vessel within minutes. AIS was designed as a collision-avoidance and traffic-management tool, but the same open signal makes worldwide vessel tracking possible.
Each vessel's heading indicates the direction it is travelling, and its trailing track shows the recent path. Tilt and rotate the 3-D globe to follow a ship along its route, and hover or tap a marker for its name, type, speed and last-reported position.
Real-time vessel tracking supports a wide range of people. Logistics and supply-chain teams use marine traffic maps to estimate arrival times, spot congestion and monitor shipments. Port operators and agents track approaching traffic to plan berths, pilots and tugs. Traders and analysts watch tanker and bulk-carrier movements as a signal of commodity flows. And maritime enthusiasts, students and researchers simply enjoy watching global shipping unfold on a live ship map — spotting the world's largest container ships or following a ferry across a familiar strait.
This is a live demo of the LatLng mapping stack: live AIS positions rendered as a real-time layer on LatLng basemap tiles, with custom point and boundary data served through the Dataset Tiles API. You can build your own real-time or static map the same way on a free tier.
AIS (Automatic Identification System) is a radio transponder system that ships broadcast to share their identity, position, course and speed. This map plots those live AIS positions so you can follow vessels worldwide in real time.
Yes. The map is a free interactive demo of live AIS vessel positions, built on the LatLng maps platform, which offers a free tier for its basemap and dataset tiles APIs.
You can see cargo ships, oil and chemical tankers, passenger ferries, tugs, fishing vessels and more — colour-coded by vessel type, with live position, course and speed from AIS.