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Why IP location is much more difficult to determine than it seems

  • Yinhao Lee
  • July 21, 2026
  • 3 minutes

Many people believe that an IP address is basically the GPS coordinates of a computer. Enter an IP, and you get the exact address, including the house number, apartment, and the owner's name. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the Internet doesn't work that way.

In practice, IP geolocation is a probabilistic model based on a huge amount of data: routing, provider information, BGP, ASN, history of address range usage, statistics, and machine learning. Therefore two different services can easily show different cities for the same IP, and sometimes even different countries.

Where do data come from anyway?

There is no single global database where it would be recorded: “IP 1.2.3.4 is located here.”

Each geolocation database provider builds its own model. Some rely more on data from Internet service providers, some analyze routes, some collect information from millions of user devices.

That's why market-leading databases and others regularly diverge from each other.

If a service shows only one data source, you are effectively seeing the opinion of a single database.

Why one database is a risk

Imagine you bought a mobile proxy for Germany: one database marks it as Berlin, another as Frankfurt, a third even considers it located in the Netherlands. Which answer is correct? Likely there isn't a completely correct answer. Each database has its own accuracy and its own delays in updating information. That is why when checking an IP it is much more useful to compare several independent sources at once rather than trust a single result.

Geography — not everything

A modern IP can tell much more than just the country.

Useful to look at:

  • ASN — the autonomous system to which the address belongs;
  • ISP — the Internet service provider;
  • type of connection;
  • region and city;
  • approximate coordinates.

For an engineer, this information is often much more valuable than the name of the locality.

For example, ASN immediately reveals whether the IP belongs to a mobile operator, a home provider, or a large data center.

Why this matters when working with proxies

If you use proxies for automation, scraping, advertising, testing, or multi-account work, geography is only one of the characteristics.

Equally important to understand:

  • whether the IP actually belongs to a mobile network;
  • whether it is not identified as a data center;
  • whether data from different geolocation bases agree;
  • whether the operator matches what the seller claimed.

On Reddit there are regularly stories where "residential" proxies end up being ranges of cloud providers. One of the simplest ways to check this is to look at the ASN and compare it with the actual Internet provider.

Why coordinates can't be considered precise

Many are surprised when they see the IP's latitude and longitude. It seems the system knows the device's location to within a few meters. In reality, coordinates are usually only the approximate center of the city, region, or the provider's service area. For mobile operators, the situation is even more interesting. The same IP can be used by a huge number of subscribers via CGNAT, and its geographic position can change as the device moves between base stations.

How to check IP correctly

If you really need to understand how an IP looks on the Internet, you should analyze several parameters at once:

  • geography in several independent bases;
  • ASN;
  • Internet provider;
  • connection type (Mobile, Residential, Datacenter);
  • consistency of results across sources.

It is this approach that allows you to quickly detect geolocation errors, incorrect network classifications, or proxy problems.

Therefore good IP Location Lookup today is no longer just a "show country" service. It is a full-fledged network diagnostic tool that lets you see how your IP is perceived by various databases, assess its network ownership, and ensure that it matches your expectations. For this, it is particularly convenient to use services that simultaneously compare results from several popular geolocation bases and show not only the country and city, but also the ASN, ISP, and connection type.