Why is my location wrong?

If the city or the pin on this site does not match where you are, the problem is almost never your device. IP geolocation has a short list of well-known failure modes, and most of them come from how networks are built rather than from anything you did. This page explains the common ones, runs one honest measurement in your browser, and gives you a way to tell us about a wrong result.

What IP geolocation really measures

A geolocation database does not know where you are. It knows a range of addresses and what the internet registry recorded about it: which network holds it, which country it was registered in, sometimes a city the ISP gave. Every lookup, ours included, returns that recorded answer for the range your address falls in — accurate to a city at best, and often only to a region or a country.

The usual reasons a city is wrong

City-level databases: The database maps an address range to a city. Where an ISP registers its whole regional pool at one address, every customer in that region inherits that one city — even if they are hundreds of kilometres away.
ISP hubs and allocation registration: An ISP often registers a block at its head office or at the data centre where the block is managed, not where the subscribers live. Your address can therefore be pinned to a city you have never visited.
Mobile networks, NAT and CGNAT: Mobile carriers put thousands of subscribers behind a small pool of public addresses (carrier-grade NAT). The address you appear as belongs to the carrier's gateway, which may sit in a completely different city from your phone.
VPN, proxy and relay services: A VPN or proxy replaces your address with one of its own, so the location shown is the exit server's. This is not an error in the lookup — the address really is there. The same is true for a privacy relay or a hotspot.
Corporate egress: Offices, schools and hotels route all their traffic through one gateway, often in a head-office city or a cloud region. Everyone behind it shares one geolocation answer.
Anycast and CDN addresses: Some addresses are announced from many places at once. There is no single correct location for them, and a city-level answer is a convention rather than a fact.

None of this can be fully fixed by a better database, which is why this site labels its data as an estimate rather than an address.

A sanity check you can run right now

Your browser just loaded this page from our server, and that round trip is a real measurement of distance. Light in fibre travels about 200 km per millisecond, so a round trip of a couple of milliseconds cannot come from the other side of the world. We take three samples and use the fastest, which is the least distorted by other traffic.

Measured round trip to our server: measuring…

This is the same bound the game Ping Detective teaches: a latency tells you the maximum distance to an address, never its position, and one measurement alone says almost nothing. To see the real path rather than a database's guess, trace the route from our server to 216.73.217.51 and watch the hops.

Report a wrong location

We show your address and the location our database claims for it, exactly as the server sees them. Only your note is submitted — the address and the claimed location are filled in on the server and cannot be changed from this form.

Address: 216.73.217.51
Our database says: Columbus, United States (39.9612, -82.9988)

The report channel is not configured on this instance, so the form is unavailable. Nothing you send here would reach anyone, and we would rather say so than drop it silently. The site owner can enable it by setting IPMAP_REPORT_EMAIL.

What we do with a report

It is mailed to the site owner, nothing else. There is no account, no cookie, no queue and no database write: the comment travels in the body of one message (sent with control characters stripped) and the subject is a fixed line plus your address. At most three reports are accepted per connection per hour.

More tools: all network tools · traceroute globe · Ping Detective · what sites see about you · DNS records · ad & analytics checker.