Where Am I? Your IP Address Location and Why It Can Be Wrong

The box below shows where your public IP address places you right now, the same estimate any website can make without asking for your location. Under it, you’ll see how to read each line, why the place can be wrong and how to fix it.

How to read your IP location

Every line in the box comes from looking up your public IP address in a geolocation database.

A long address with colons is IPv6. Many connections have both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address, and the two can map to different places.

How IP location works

Every public IP address belongs to a block that IANA hands to one of five regional internet registries. ARIN, the registry for the US, Canada and parts of the Caribbean, assigns blocks to providers and companies. It records who holds each block and their country, but not where each address is used.

Geolocation databases fill in the rest. They combine registry records with the locations providers publish for their own blocks in a geofeed (RFC 8805), plus network measurements and corrections. Geofeeds stop at the city level by design. The lookup never touches your device’s GPS; it only knows which network your traffic comes from. How IP geolocation works covers each data source.

How accurate is IP address location?

Accuracy drops as you zoom in:

• Country: usually right.
• State or region: often right.
• City: frequently off, especially on mobile data, where you may see the city of your carrier’s gateway.
• Coordinates: the center of an area, or of the whole country if that’s all the database knows.

When the country is wrong, the cause is usually a VPN, a proxy, a work network or a recently transferred address block. Databases also disagree with each other, so two websites can place you in different cities. How accurate IP geolocation is has the numbers from published studies, by level and connection type.

Why your IP address shows the wrong location

These are the usual reasons:

• Mobile data and carrier-grade NAT: carriers route phone traffic through a few regional gateways, and carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) lets many customers share one public IP. You appear where the gateway is, often another city or state.
• VPN or proxy: sites see the server’s IP, so you appear in the server’s city.
• iCloud Private Relay: Safari gets a relay address that maps to a roughly city-level area near you, or anywhere in your country and time zone if you chose Use Country and Time Zone. The ISP line then shows the relay’s network, not your provider.
• Work or school networks: traffic often leaves through headquarters or a cloud security service, so you appear at that exit.
• ISP routing: some providers connect to the internet at a regional hub, or the database still maps the block to the provider’s registered address.
• Recently reassigned addresses: blocks move between providers and regions, and databases can lag behind.
• Satellite internet: providers often map their addresses to a few hub cities, sometimes several states away. In-flight Wi-Fi often does the same.
• Rural connections: databases often place rural customers in the nearest larger town.

IP location vs. your device’s GPS location

A map pin on your street doesn’t come from your IP. It comes from your device’s location service, which uses GPS, nearby Wi-Fi networks and cell towers. Under the W3C Geolocation standard, a browser shares that position with a site only after you give permission, and only on secure (HTTPS) pages.

From your IP alone, a website learns your approximate area, time zone and ISP, whether the address belongs to a mobile carrier, business, data center, VPN or relay, and when several visits come from the same connection. Your device’s time zone and language settings are a separate signal, which is how a site can know your local time even when your IP points elsewhere. For your exact position, use a map app.

What your IP address does not reveal

An IP lookup can’t show your name, street address, phone number or email, and it can’t pinpoint where you are. Only your ISP can match an IP address to a customer account. In the US, providers generally release those subscriber details only under legal process, such as a subpoena or court order.

If the box shows a city where you’ve never been, or where someone you know lives, that does not mean anyone knows where you are. It’s where the database places your provider’s network.

How to fix a wrong IP location

First check where the wrong place comes from. If this box is right but one site is wrong, fix that site. If the box is wrong too, the IP data needs a correction.

1. Turn off any VPN or proxy, then reload this page.
2. Switch between Wi-Fi and mobile data, then compare the results.
3. Report the wrong location through our contact page with your IP address and your actual city.
4. Ask your ISP to check the geolocation of your IP address. The provider can update its geofeed, the public list of where it uses its addresses that geolocation databases read.
5. Change the location in the settings of the site that’s wrong, such as a streaming or weather service, or clear that site’s cookies.
6. Allow time. Databases and the sites that use them refresh on their own schedules.

iPhone or Mac with iCloud Private Relay

Private Relay covers browsing in Safari. If Safari shows a different city than another browser on the same device, Private Relay is the likely cause. To keep the relay address close to you on iPhone:

1. Open Settings.
2. Tap your name.
3. Tap iCloud.
4. Tap Private Relay.
5. Tap IP Address Location.
6. Choose Maintain General Location.

On a Mac:

1. Open System Settings.
2. Click your name at the top of the sidebar.
3. Click iCloud.
4. Click Private Relay.
5. In the IP Address Location pop-up menu, choose Maintain general location.

To let one website see your real IP address, tap the Page Menu button in Safari on iPhone, then tap Show IP Address. In Safari on a Mac, choose View > Reload and Show IP Address. Apple describes both options in its guide to managing iCloud Private Relay.

Google shows the wrong city

At the bottom of a Google results page, the line with your location names its source. From your internet address means Google used your IP.

To let Google use your device’s location in Chrome instead:

1. Go to google.com.
2. Click the icon to the left of the web address.
3. Click Site settings.
4. Next to Location, choose Allow.

If your browser is slow to share your location, Google may reuse the location of your last search, kept in a cookie for up to six hours. You can always name a place in your search. Google lists its location sources in its Search location help.

Check another IP address

Enter any IPv4 or IPv6 address, for example one from your router or server logs, to see its approximate location and network.

Developers can get the same fields as JSON from iplookupapi: call the /v1/info endpoint without an ip parameter for the caller’s own address, or use the batch IP lookup API to check up to 1,000 addresses per request.