How the IP location lookup tool works
What the tool can estimate
The tool can identify the country (usually reliably) and a possible city/region with a confidence level showing how accurate that signal is. It also shows the ASN/organization that manages the IP, a PTR hostname if one exists, and network latency measurements from real locations worldwide, where possible.
What it cannot show
The IP address geolocation tool never indicates a specific building, street, or exact address. Nor can it prove that a person is at a specific spot. All it can show is the likely location of the network infrastructure behind the IP address.
Why do IP geolocation databases disagree?
Each IP geolocation database we use is built from different underlying IP address records and updates at a different pace. None of them is 100% up to date or accurate. Disagreement between them is normal, especially for IPs belonging to hosting providers, CDNs, or VPN services, which change owners or are transferred very frequently.
How do network latency measurements help?
Our tool measures network latency from probes in various countries/cities around the world toward the target IP. Very low latency from multiple independent networks toward one specific city/region is a strong signal that the infrastructure is likely located somewhere nearby. However, high latency alone does not rule out a location, as it can be caused by poor routing, network congestion, or poor interconnection quality, and not only by long distance.
What happens when I do not see network measurements?
There are 2 cases. The first is that latency cannot be measured because the IP under examination blocks ICMP requests. The second case happens when there is no available or reliable probe near the IP under examination, in which case testing from some other, distant probe could not give safe conclusions anyway.
Why an IP might show multiple possible locations
Some IPs (e.g. anycast services, CDNs, load-balanced networks) serve traffic from multiple places at once. When our sources disagree significantly on the city/region, that by itself only means uncertainty and is not proof of multiple serving locations. When, however, latency measurements show comparably low latency from geographically distant locations at the same time, the tool explicitly flags a multiple-serving-location signal.
Why the confidence level is not a mathematical probability
The High/Medium/Low/Inconclusive levels are a general assessment of the available evidence, not a statistically calculated probability. We cannot show a numeric score (e.g. "91%"), because that would give a false impression of precision that has not been validated against real, independently confirmed data. Doing so would require hundreds or even thousands of data points to analyze for every IP address, which today are simply not available to any third party, only to internet service providers, and even then only for the IPs they assign to their own customers.
Which sources are used?
We only use the freely available geolocation databases from MaxMind, DB-IP and IP2Location. For registration data we use the IANA RDAP bootstrap registry, and RIPE Atlas / Globalping for network latency measurements (ping latency).
How often are the IP geolocation databases updated?
Our databases are updated, depending on the data provider, from twice a week up to at most once a month, and the process is fully automated. Every database refresh is automatically applied to the results we produce, so you can be sure you always see up-to-date data.
What data is stored, and for how long
The result for a target IP is cached for up to 7 days (much less if the result was incomplete, without latency measurements). We do not permanently store your own IP as a visitor, User-Agent, cookies, or anything else that could identify you, but to prevent abuse of the service we allow up to 3 lookups per day for each unique IP. The limit resets after 24 hours.
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