When a website greets you in the right language or shows prices in your currency, it has probably looked up your IP address in a geolocation database. These databases are useful — and widely misunderstood.
Where the data comes from
No database can see where a device physically is. Instead, providers combine indirect signals:
- Registry records: the country an address block is registered in, from the regional internet registries.
- Routing data: which network announces the block and where that network operates.
- Network measurements: latency from many vantage points; a few milliseconds of delay limits how far away an address can be.
- Operator-published data: some networks publish geofeeds (RFC 8805) saying where their prefixes are used.
- Partner and user-submitted data: corrections from network operators and, in commercial products, data from apps and Wi-Fi.
The result is an estimate for a block of addresses, not for an individual device.
How accurate is it?
Accuracy varies by provider and by type of connection, but the pattern is consistent:
- Country is right in the vast majority of cases.
- Region is usually right for fixed broadband in large countries.
- City is right much less often — sometimes it’s the nearest large city, sometimes the location of the provider’s equipment hundreds of kilometres away.
A good estimate comes with an accuracy radius; this site draws it on the map. Coordinates are rounded to about a kilometre, because pretending to more precision would be misleading.
Why your IP shows the wrong place
- Mobile networks route traffic through a few central gateways, so phones across a country can appear in one city.
- Carrier-grade NAT puts many customers behind one address, at a central location.
- VPNs, proxies and privacy relays show the location of their exit servers.
- Satellite internet may exit in another country entirely.
- Reassigned blocks keep stale data until databases catch up.
An Israeli example
Israeli providers concentrate their central equipment and data centres in a few places, and geolocation databases often place whole blocks there. In our copy of DB-IP Lite, about 45 % of the IPv4 addresses placed in Israel are in the Tel Aviv district and another 31 % in the Central district (Petah Tikva, Rosh HaAyin) — far more than their share of the population. Someone in Be’er Sheva, Eilat or Kiryat Shmona who sees Tel Aviv or Petah Tikva as their location is looking at the provider’s equipment, not a fault. Even a university is not immune: the Hebrew University’s web server, 128.139.7.8, is in Jerusalem, but DB-IP places its block in Tel Aviv. Israel in numbers shows the estimated spread across the six districts.
Correcting a location
If your address is consistently wrong, contact the geolocation provider — our location data comes from DB-IP, which accepts corrections, and so do other databases. Network operators can publish a geofeed so every provider gets it right.
What it should never be used for
IP geolocation cannot identify a person or a home. It shouldn’t be used to locate someone, to dispatch emergency services or as the only evidence for decisions about an individual. If an application needs your precise location, it has to ask for it through the browser — and you can say no.
See where any address is estimated to be — with its accuracy radius and source — in the IP geolocation tool.