About IP Geolocation Explainer

Classify an IP offline, learn what GeoIP can and cannot tell you, and get the commands to query a real GeoIP source. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Networking collection.

Use Cases

• Debug why a geolocation-based feature (currency, language, pricing) is showing wrong values for a specific user.
• Verify that a CDN edge node is serving traffic from the expected geographic region.
• Identify the country and ISP of an IP found in server access logs during a security investigation.
• Test geo-restriction logic by looking up known international IP ranges.

Tips

• Look up your own public IP to verify which country, city, and ISP your traffic appears to come from — important for debugging geo-restricted API access.
• Note that geolocation accuracy drops significantly below city level — country is 98%+ accurate, city is 70-80%, street-level is not reliable.
• VPN and Tor exit nodes often show as data center ASNs — check the ISP and ASN fields to detect proxy usage.

Fun Facts

• IP geolocation databases work by correlating IP address ranges with registration records (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC) and network routing data — not GPS. This is why accuracy degrades at fine-grained levels.
• MaxMind's GeoLite2, the most widely used free geolocation database, updates weekly and achieves 99.8% country-level accuracy and 83% US city-level accuracy as of 2023.
• IPv6 geolocation is significantly less accurate than IPv4 because IPv6 subnets are assigned in larger blocks and routed differently — many IPv6 lookup results return only country or continent.

FAQ

How accurate is city-level geolocation?

70-80% for major US and EU cities. Accuracy drops significantly in rural areas and developing markets. Country-level is nearly always correct (98%+).

Can I look up private/RFC1918 IPs?

Private IPs (10.x, 172.16-31.x, 192.168.x) don't have geolocation data — they're not routed on the public internet. The tool returns 'private range' for these inputs.

What's an ASN?

Autonomous System Number — a unique identifier for a network operator (ISP, university, cloud provider). ASN data is useful for identifying whether an IP belongs to a data center, residential ISP, or VPN provider.