How Accurate Is IP Geolocation?
By Daniel Last updated July 4, 2026
IP geolocation is very reliable at country level (roughly 95–99% correct) but hit-or-miss at city level, where accuracy ranges from about 55% to 80% depending on the provider and the country. It can never identify your street or house; only your ISP can connect an address to a customer.
How geolocation databases are built
No official record says where an IP address physically is. Geolocation providers like MaxMind, IP2Location, and DB-IP infer a location by combining several imperfect signals:
- Registry data: the five Regional Internet Registries publish which organization each address block is allocated to, and registrants list a country and often a city. Sources like RIPE NCC make this data public, but it reflects where the block is registered, not where each address is used.
- ISP allocation patterns: providers study how ISPs carve their blocks into regions and cities, sometimes with data shared by the ISPs themselves.
- Latency measurement: pinging an address from servers around the world and triangulating from the round-trip times narrows down roughly where it must be.
- User signals: when people reveal a location alongside their IP (a store locator search, a GPS-enabled app, a shipping address), aggregated hints like these calibrate the databases.
The result is an educated guess with a confidence area, refreshed on a weekly or monthly cycle, and it is only as current as the last time each signal was observed.
Accuracy by level: country, region, city, street
Accuracy falls off a cliff as you zoom in. MaxMind publishes its own per-country accuracy figures, and the pattern is consistent across providers:
| Reliability | Notes | |
|---|---|---|
| Country | ~95–99% | Trustworthy enough for compliance, licensing, and language defaults |
| Region / state | ~70–90% | Varies widely by country and by how the ISP allocates addresses |
| City | ~55–80% | Hit-or-miss; often shows the ISP hub city, or is off by 50+ km |
| Street / house | Not possible | No public database maps an IP to an address; only your ISP can |
In other words: trust the country, treat the city as a suggestion, and ignore anyone claiming an IP reveals a street address.
Why IP location is often wrong
- ISP hub cities: ISPs often register whole address blocks to a regional office or data center, so everyone in the area geolocates to the hub city instead of their own town.
- Mobile CGNAT gateways: mobile carriers funnel thousands of customers through shared gateways (carrier-grade NAT), so your phone's IP can place you wherever the gateway lives, sometimes in another region entirely.
- VPNs and proxies: if your traffic exits through a VPN or proxy server, geolocation correctly locates the server, which by design is not where you are.
- Stale reassignments: address blocks get sold, traded, and reallocated between networks. Until every database catches up, an address can geolocate to its previous life, occasionally on the wrong continent.
What the "accuracy radius" means
Good geolocation data comes with an honest error bar. MaxMind, for example, publishes an accuracy radius with each lookup: the estimated location is the center of a circle, and the true location is expected to fall somewhere
inside it. A radius of 20 km means "probably within 20 kilometers of this point," not "at this point." That is
why the map on this site draws your location with the radius around it rather than dropping a confident pin. If the circle
covers half your metro area, the database is telling you it only really knows your region, and a small radius is a claim of
confidence, not a guarantee.
Why your IP location is wrong, and how to interpret it
If a website places you in the wrong city, nothing is broken and nobody has better data on you than you think. It simply means the database's guess for your current address block is off, for one of the reasons above. Check what your connection looks like right now on what is my IP location, which shows the estimated coordinates and the accuracy radius together. To see how any other address resolves, run it through the IP lookup tool. Read the result as "the network I am using appears to be around here," never as "this is where I am." As a rule of thumb: country is dependable, region is probable, city is a coin flip weighted in the database's favor.
Can you improve or correct it?
If your IP consistently geolocates to the wrong place, you can submit a correction request to MaxMind and the other database providers; fixes are reviewed manually and can take weeks to reach the thousands of sites that consume the data. But there is no way to make IP geolocation precise, because the precision was never there. When an app needs your real position, it should ask the browser's Geolocation API, which uses GPS, Wi-Fi, and cell-tower positioning and requires your explicit permission; your IP plays no part in it.
Because published accuracy numbers are mostly vendor self-reporting, this site is beginning to collect anonymous, aggregate statistics on the deviation between GPS position and IP-estimated position from visitors who opt in to sharing browser location. No IP addresses are stored; only the distance between the two estimates is kept, so we can publish real-world accuracy data rather than repeating marketing figures.