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Geolocation and Regional Access

Where the guess comes from, why yours is wrong, and what to do about it.

Pillar guide Updated September 2026 About 20 minutes

The fact everything else follows from

Nothing in an IP address encodes a place. There is no field inside 203.0.113.42 that says Pennsylvania. Every location you have ever been shown from an address is an inference assembled from other records.

Once that lands, "why is it wrong" stops being mysterious and becomes a reasonable question about how good a guess can be.

1. How the guess is assembled

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Where a location guess comes from No part of an IP address encodes a place. A geolocation database combines registry records, routing announcements, latency measurement and user-submitted corrections into an estimate. Nothing in 203.0.113.42 says "Easton, Pennsylvania" The number is an identifier, not a coordinate. Everything below is inference. Registry Which company holds this block, and where it operates Routing Which networks announce it, and from where Measurement Round-trip times from many known points, triangulated Corrections Reports from users and providers who know better A geolocation database publishes one best guess per block Every website you visit buys or licenses one of these. Two sites can disagree about you on the same day.
Four independent sources combined into one published best guess per address block. Providers weight them differently, which is why two websites can disagree about you on the same afternoon.

Registry records say which organization holds a block and roughly where it operates, which is the floor and why country accuracy is high. Routing announcements narrow that toward a region. Active measurement times replies from machines whose locations are known exactly, and light in fiber covers about 125 miles per millisecond of round trip, so consistent timings triangulate. Corrections from users and providers fix specific wrong answers, and are the only source that can.

2. How accurate it really is

How accurate IP geolocation is by level Country level accuracy is very high. Region is moderate. City is roughly a coin flip and worse on mobile, satellite and VPN connections. Street level is not something IP geolocation can do at all. Accuracy falls off a cliff as you zoom in Country very high Region moderate City a coin flip Street not possible Bars are illustrative rather than measured, and every provider publishes different figures. Worst on mobile carriers, satellite links, VPNs, and corporate networks that leave through one office. In those cases the answer describes the network's exit point, which can be hundreds of miles away.
Accuracy is not one number. It collapses as you zoom in, and the drop between region and city is where most people's expectations break.

Published figures put country accuracy above 95 percent for most providers. City accuracy is commonly quoted between 50 and 80 percent, and the honest reading of that range is that it depends enormously on your provider and where you live. Dense urban areas on a fixed line do well. Everything else does worse.

Street level is not something IP geolocation does at all, whatever a television show implied.

3. Why yours specifically is wrong

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Five causes account for almost every case, and they are distinguishable.

SymptomUsual cause
Consistently a bigger city an hour awayYour provider hands traffic to the internet there
Wildly different, changing oftenA mobile carrier, aggregating a huge area
Another state or country entirelySatellite, or a VPN you forgot was on
Right for years, suddenly wrongThe block was transferred and databases lag
Right on one site, wrong on anotherThey license different databases

4. Getting it corrected

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This does work, and almost nobody writes it down properly. The reason it feels impossible is one fact that is rarely stated.

Why fixing your location has to be done more than once There is no central registry of IP locations. Each provider keeps its own database, so a correction filed with one does not reach the others, and the websites using them update on their own schedules. There is no central registry to correct This is the single fact that makes the process confusing, and nobody says it out loud. Your correction filed with one provider Provider A updated Provider B still wrong Provider C never heard about it Each website licenses one of these. The site that annoyed you may use B or C, so a correction to A changes nothing for you. File with each provider whose answer you care about, then wait: databases publish on a cycle and the sites using them refresh on their own. Weeks, not days.
There is no central registry. Each provider keeps its own database, so a correction filed with one does not reach the others, and the site that annoyed you may not use the one you fixed.

The process: work out which providers are actually wrong by checking your address against each of their own lookup pages, file with the ones whose answer you care about, and wait. Databases publish on a cycle and the sites using them refresh on their own schedule, so a correction accepted today may take a month to show up where you noticed the problem.

5. How streaming enforces regions

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Regional catalogs exist because rights are sold by territory, so a service that has the rights in one country may genuinely not have them in another. Enforcement uses considerably more than your address.

The four layers a streaming service checks Regional licensing is enforced with more than an IP address. Services also check whether the address belongs to a known VPN or data center, which country the account and payment method belong to, and sometimes the device's own settings. Changing your apparent location moves the first layer only 1. Your IP address Which country the geolocation database says you are in. This is the layer a VPN changes. 2. Is that address a VPN or a data center? Those ranges are catalogued and widely licensed. Being flagged is often enough on its own. 3. Your account and payment method The country your account was created in, and the billing country of the card paying for it. 4. The device itself Locale, time zone, app store region, and on mobile sometimes the actual location permission. This is why a working VPN often still shows the same catalog: layers two through four never moved. It is also why the restriction is a contract question rather than a technical one. The service is not confused about where you are.
Layer two is the one that usually decides. Hosting and VPN address ranges are catalogued and sold as a data product, so being in one is often enough on its own regardless of which country it claims.

Worth being clear about what this is: a contract question rather than a technical one. Getting around it is usually a terms-of-service matter rather than a legal one, and the position is worth understanding rather than being sold a tool for.

6. What geolocation is genuinely good at

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Almost all coverage of this subject is about geolocation failing. It is worth spending a moment on the case where it works well, because it explains what the technology is actually for.

How a content network uses your address to pick a server A content delivery network answers from the edge location nearest you, decided from your address and from network routing. This is the use of geolocation that works well, because it only needs to be roughly right. The use that works, because it only has to be roughly right You request a page The network decides from your address and from routing Nearest edge, 12 ms away A distant one, 140 ms away Why this is the good use of geolocation Being wrong about your city costs a few milliseconds. Being wrong about your country costs a few more. Nothing breaks, nobody is denied anything, and the answer degrades gently rather than failing. Compare with the bad use Denying access based on a city-level guess that is right about half the time, where being wrong means a person who paid for something cannot use it.
Content networks use it to answer from a nearby server. Being wrong costs milliseconds and nothing breaks, which is the profile of a good use.
UseAccuracy neededCost of being wrong
Routing to a nearby serverRegionMilliseconds
Choosing a currency or languageCountryMild annoyance, if overridable
Fraud scoring a loginCountry, plus connection typeAn extra verification step
Regional licensingCountrySomeone who paid cannot watch
Local weather or shopsCityWrong answers, frequently
Locating a personStreetNot achievable at all

The pattern is that the good uses degrade gently and the bad ones fail hard. Anything that denies something based on a city-level guess is asking more of the technology than it can deliver.

Where our number comes from

The location on our front page comes from AWS CloudFront, which adds geographic headers to requests as they pass through its edge network. Our API reads those headers and returns them with your address. We run no database of our own, store nothing, and enrich it with nothing.

So our answer is exactly as good as CloudFront's and will sometimes disagree with another site. Given everything above, that is expected rather than surprising, which is why the accuracy caveat sits next to the map rather than in a footnote.

Read any section in full

How does IP geolocation work?The four sources, and how the guess is assembled. Why is my IP location wrong?Diagnosing which of the five causes is yours. How to fix a wrong locationFiling corrections, and why it has to be done more than once. Streaming and regional accessWhy rights are territorial, and the four layers of enforcement. How CDNs use geolocationThe use it is genuinely good at, plus fraud and compliance. IP Address FundamentalsThe allocation hierarchy that makes any of this possible.