IP Geolocation Lookup

IP geolocation cannot determine a street address under any circumstance — it has no data source that resolves to that level of precision. What it can determine reliably is country (about 99% accurate) and, with lower confidence, region or city. Any claim of pinpoint address-level accuracy from IP alone should be treated with skepticism regardless of which tool makes it.

The most common cause is mobile carrier CGNAT (Carrier-Grade NAT), where thousands of mobile subscribers across a wide geographic area share a small pool of public IP addresses — the geolocation database maps that IP to the carrier's regional gateway, not your actual location, which can be an entire city or more away. On fixed broadband, a wrong city usually means the geolocation provider's database hasn't caught up with a recent IP block reassignment by your ISP.

No — this is a hard technical limit, not a privacy feature being withheld. Geolocation databases are built from ISP-reported regional allocations, not individual subscriber addresses. Reaching an actual street address requires the ISP's own subscriber records, which are private and only disclosed through legal process such as a subpoena.

Yes, for this specific purpose — a VPN replaces your real IP with the VPN server's IP for any site or tool checking your location, so a geolocation lookup will show the VPN server's location rather than yours. It's worth pairing with our WebRTC and DNS leak tests, since those check whether your real IP is leaking through a separate channel even while your main connection is routed through the VPN.

Each provider maintains its own database, built from different combinations of regional registry data, ISP submissions, and crowd-sourced corrections, updated on different schedules. Disagreement between tools — especially at the city level — is common and expected; country-level results are far more likely to agree across providers because that data comes from the same small set of authoritative registries.

Looking up the general location tied to a publicly visible IP address (for example, one that contacted your own server or service) is generally legal in most jurisdictions, since you're querying publicly available registry data. Using it to systematically monitor, harass, or build a profile of a specific individual without their knowledge can cross into stalking or privacy-law violations depending on your jurisdiction and intent — the lookup itself is legal, but what you do with repeated, targeted results may not be.

Not from the IP address alone — but they can with an additional legal step. An IP address by itself only reveals the ISP and approximate location, not a name. To connect an IP address and timestamp to a specific subscriber, law enforcement generally needs to serve the ISP with a subpoena or court order compelling them to disclose their internal connection logs for that IP at that exact time — see our full breakdown of what a public IP address actually reveals for more on this distinction.

The underlying method is the same — mapping address blocks to registry-reported regions — but IPv6 geolocation databases are generally less mature and less densely populated than their IPv4 counterparts, simply because IPv4 mapping has had roughly three decades longer to accumulate corrections and refinements. Expect somewhat lower city-level accuracy on IPv6 addresses than on IPv4 addresses from the same provider, even though country-level accuracy is comparable for both.