How a website finds your location from an IP address
When you open a page, your connection arrives from an IP address that your internet provider assigned. Companies that build geolocation databases map those addresses to places using registry records, the way providers announce their networks, and measurements such as how long packets take to arrive. The website looks your address up in one of those databases and receives a country, a region and usually a city. That is how a shop shows prices in your currency and how a streaming service decides which catalogue you can see.
What the result can and cannot reveal
The country is correct most of the time. The city is right in a majority of cases on fixed home broadband and is much less reliable on mobile data, where traffic often leaves the network from a regional hub. The coordinates in the result are rounded and mark the centre of an area, not your house. No one can read your street address from your IP address. What the location does reveal is enough to localise advertising, to estimate which jurisdiction you are in and to flag a login from an unexpected country.
Why your IP location may be wrong
- Mobile networks route traffic through central gateways, so you may appear in another city.
- VPNs and proxies replace your address with the server's, so the location is the server's.
- Carrier-grade NAT shares one public address between many customers, which makes the location approximate.
- Outdated databases may still list an address block under its previous owner.
- Corporate and school networks often exit through a head office far from where you sit.
Our guide to why your IP location is wrong goes through each cause and what you can do about it.
How to change what websites see
If you do not want a site to know your area, route your traffic through a VPN, a proxy or Tor, which replaces the address the site sees. After connecting, refresh this page to confirm the location changed, and run the DNS leak test to be sure your lookups are not still going out through your provider. For the options and their trade-offs, see how to hide your IP address.
Your IP location is not your GPS location
Browsers can also ask for your precise location, but only if you press Allow in a prompt. That uses GPS, Wi-Fi and cell data and is far more accurate than anything derived from an IP address. This page never asks for it: everything shown here comes from the IP address alone.
Last reviewed 2026-10-28. Found a mistake? Report a correction (how we handle them).