2026-09-21 · IPV4 Scanner
Look up your own IP address and there is a decent chance the city is wrong. Sometimes it is a neighbouring town, sometimes a city two hundred miles away, occasionally another country.
This is not a bug in whichever tool you used. IP geolocation is an estimate built from indirect evidence, and understanding where the evidence comes from explains exactly when to trust it.
The first thing to understand: an IP address contains no geographic information whatsoever. It is a routing identifier. Nothing in the number says where anything is.
Everything you see in a geolocation result is inference, assembled from:
Different providers weight these differently, which is why two lookups of the same address disagree.
Country-level accuracy is high — generally in the high nineties for ordinary fixed-line connections. That is why geographic content licensing works at all.
City-level accuracy is a different matter. It is reasonable in dense urban areas of well-mapped countries, and it degrades quickly outside them. Rural areas are frequently placed at whatever town the provider's nearest facility is in. And "city-level" in a vendor's marketing usually means "within 50 km", which is a generous definition of a city.
Anything more precise than a city should be treated as decorative. Street-level IP geolocation is not a thing that works, whatever an interface implies by showing a map pin.
Mobile networks. The worst case by a wide margin. Mobile traffic is routed through a relatively small number of gateways, so an entire region can appear at one point. Your phone can be placed hundreds of miles away while reporting a perfectly confident result.
Corporate networks. A company routing all offices through one internet connection makes every employee appear at headquarters, regardless of country.
Satellite. Historically placed at the ground station, which can be a different country from the user.
Reassigned blocks. Address blocks are sold and reallocated, and databases lag. A block that moved from a German provider to a Brazilian one may be geolocated in Germany for months.
Default coordinates. This one has caused real harm. When a database knows the country but not the city, it has to return something, and some providers historically returned the geographic centre of the country. Any address that fell back to the default was mapped to one specific point — which in at least one well-documented case was a farm, whose occupants spent years being blamed for internet crimes traced to "their" location. Good providers now return a deliberately imprecise centroid with an accuracy radius instead.
Used with appropriate confidence, it is useful: choosing a default language or currency, routing to a nearby CDN edge, complying with content licensing, and flagging anomalies in fraud scoring — a login from an unexpected country is worth a second factor, though not an automatic block.
What it should never do is make a consequential decision on its own. Blocking a user, refusing a transaction or attributing an action to a person on the strength of a geolocation lookup is building on an estimate with no error bars on the screen.
Our IP location finder shows what a typical database reports for an address, and comparing it with where you actually are is instructive — particularly on mobile data, where the gap is often startling.
If your location is reported wrongly and it matters, most major geolocation providers operate a correction form. It takes a few weeks to propagate, because every downstream service consumes the data on its own schedule.
Why does my IP address show the wrong city?
Because the mapping is inferred from registry records and measurement rather than read from the address. You are typically placed at your provider's nearest infrastructure, which can be a long way from you.
Can an IP address reveal my street address?
No. Databases resolve to city or region at best, and "city-level" often means within 50 km. Linking an address to a household requires your provider's own records.
Why is my phone's location so far off?
Mobile traffic exits through a limited number of gateways, so a whole region can appear at one location. Mobile geolocation is the least reliable category there is.
How do I correct my IP location?
Submit a correction to the major geolocation providers, who each publish a form. Expect weeks for it to reach the services that use their data.
Does a VPN change my geolocation?
Yes, to wherever the VPN server is — which is the point. Many services detect and block known VPN ranges, so the result is often being flagged rather than relocated.