Why Is My IP Location Wrong?
IP geolocation doesn't measure where you are — it looks your address block up in a commercial database that maps blocks to the places ISPs register and route them. Those records lag reality, mobile carriers funnel whole regions through a few gateways, and VPNs replace your IP entirely. Country-level lookups are ~95–99% right; city-level, often only 50–80%.
There is no location inside an IP address
An IP address is a routing number, not a coordinate. 'IP location' is an inference: companies like MaxMind and IP2Location maintain databases mapping address blocks to places, built from where ISPs register blocks, routing and latency measurements, and self-reported corrections. When a site says you're in Lyon, it means 'this database's best guess for your block is Lyon.' Different databases guess differently — which is why your IP lookup can disagree with a streaming service's idea of where you are, and both can disagree with reality.
The four usual suspects
Stale registrations: ISPs reassign blocks between cities and regions faster than databases re-verify them; a block that moved from Manchester to Birmingham may read as Manchester for months. Mobile networks: carriers route data through regional gateways, so an entire province can surface as one city — on 4G/5G your IP often locates the gateway, not you. CGNAT: ISPs short on IPv4 addresses put thousands of customers behind one shared IP, whose recorded location is wherever the pool is registered. VPNs and proxies: the IP a site sees belongs to the exit server, which is the whole point — verify what yours shows on the VPN checker.
What accuracy is realistic
Rules of thumb across the industry: country is right roughly 95–99% of the time on fixed broadband; region/state perhaps 70–90%; city commonly 50–80% and worse on mobile; street level, never — the databases don't contain it. Treat any 'IP location' as a city-sized hint. This is also the honest reason the maps on IP-lookup sites (ours included) center on a city rather than a house: the pin marks the database's centroid for your block, and any site implying more precision from an IP alone is guessing.
What you can actually do
If a specific service places you wrongly and it matters (banking flags, storefront currency, regional catalogs), three options work in practice: submit a correction to the major databases (MaxMind and IP2Location both take reports — fixes propagate to sites over weeks); toggle to IPv6 if your ISP offers it, since v6 blocks often carry fresher records; or ask your ISP whether they can route you outside CGNAT. What doesn't work: anything on your device — the record belongs to the address block, not to you. And if the goal is a service seeing a different location on purpose, that's the VPN use case, with the caveats covered in our VPN guide.
When you need your real location
The moment precision matters, skip IP entirely: grant the browser prompt on the location page and you get the GPS/Wi-Fi fused position — meters instead of city guesses, and only with your consent. The two systems fail independently, which is genuinely useful: comparing them is how our VPN check spots a tunnel, and a mismatch between where your IP says you are and where your GPS says you are is usually the fastest explanation of 'why does this website think I'm in the wrong city?'