Lookups
IP Geolocation Lookup
Trace an IP address back to an approximate location and internet provider, handy for investigating traffic or abuse reports.
Approximate, accurate to city or ISP level, not an exact address.
This lookup is sent to ipapi.co, with ipwho.is and geojs.io as fallbacks.
Learn about IP geolocation
What this is actually estimating
IP geolocation maps an address to an approximate location by cross-referencing regional internet registry allocation records (which provider a given IP block was assigned to) with databases that geolocation providers build from that ISP data, network routing information, and other signals. It's a statistical estimate built from infrastructure records, not a GPS reading or a direct trace of a device.
Reading your results
The ISP or organization field tends to be reliable, since IP blocks are unambiguously allocated to a specific provider. Location is the fuzzier part. It's often accurate to the city for home broadband, but can be off by tens or even hundreds of miles for mobile connections, which frequently route traffic through a small number of centralized carrier gateways rather than a tower-by-tower location.
Common questions
Why is the location wrong for my own connection? Mobile carriers and some ISPs route all their customers' traffic through a handful of regional gateways, so the IP you're geolocated by can reflect that gateway's location rather than where you're actually sitting. A registered business or billing address can also differ from where the network hardware physically routes from.
Can this identify a specific person? No. At most it identifies the network or ISP-level area an IP is routed through. It can't resolve to a street address, a household, or an individual.
Why does it show a different country than I'm actually in? If the connection goes through a VPN or proxy, the lookup sees that VPN server's IP, not your own. It's correctly reporting where the VPN exit node is, not where you are.