Why Your IP Shows the Wrong City (or Country) and How to Fix Each Cause
The six real reasons IP geolocation is wrong—registry lag, CGN, anycast, VPN exits, mobile gateways, stale databases—and the correction path for each.
By yandong2023 · Editorial review 2026-08-14
Geolocation is an estimate, not a measurement
Nothing in the IP protocol carries location. Every geolocation answer comes from a database someone maintains by combining registry records, routing analysis, reverse DNS hints, user-submitted corrections, and commercial feeds. Each provider (MaxMind, IPinfo, DB-IP, and the in-house databases at Google, Netflix, and every major platform) maintains its own map with its own refresh schedule. There is no authoritative source to be "right"—only providers that are more or less current for your specific range.
This is why "the internet says I am in the wrong city" is ambiguous until you specify who says it. Always compare at least two independent databases before treating a location as wrong, and note which service you actually care about—a website’s location decision comes from whichever database that website bought, which may be none of the ones you checked.
Cause 1: Carrier-grade NAT and centralized exits
If your ISP funnels an entire province or city through one egress cluster, the geolocation of that egress is the answer everyone gets. Mobile networks are the extreme case: a national carrier may exit most of a region’s traffic through two or three cities. No correction form will fix this, because the database is accurately reporting where the network exits—it is just not where you sit. Expect city-level accuracy on mobile and CGN’d connections to be permanently unreliable.
Cause 2: Range transfers and registry lag
IPv4 scarcity created an active market for address blocks. When a /16 moves from a German hosting company to a Singapore ISP, the RIR registry updates within days, but each geolocation provider learns about it on its own schedule—some within weeks, some after months. During the lag, every database shows a different country for the same address. If your recently reassigned or newly acquired range geolocates to its previous owner’s country, this is the cause, and time plus correction requests is the cure.
Cause 3: Anycast and CDN fronting
Services behind Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, and similar networks answer from the same addresses worldwide. Geolocating a CDN edge address tells you where the operator is registered, not where the node answering you sits. If you are checking the IP of a website (rather than your own connection), expect the answer to be the CDN’s registration country and treat it as meaningless for the site’s actual hosting location.
Cause 4: VPN, proxy, and security-gateway exits
Obvious but frequently missed: if any tunnel is active, the address being geolocated is the exit, not you. Corporate traffic routed through a security vendor inherits the vendor’s exit geography. Browser "VPN" features, iCloud Private Relay, and DNS-based filtering services all change the visible address. Before reporting a wrong location, enumerate everything between you and the open internet; the fix is usually to account for the tunnel rather than to correct the database.
How to submit a correction that gets accepted
Providers accept corrections backed by authoritative evidence, and ignore opinions. The strong evidence set: the RIR whois record showing the range’s registration, a statement or documentation page from the network operator describing where the range is deployed, and—if you operate the network—geofeed data in RFC 8805 format published in the whois record, which is the closest thing to a self-service fix that exists. Weak evidence: "I am physically in city X" screenshots.
Submit separately to each provider that matters to you—MaxMind, IPinfo, and DB-IP all have public correction forms, while platforms like Google and Netflix maintain their own flows. Set expectations in weeks, not days, and re-check on that schedule rather than daily. If only one provider is wrong and your services use another, you may not need the correction at all—verify which database your actual failing service consults before investing the effort.
References and source material
These sources are provided so readers can verify the technical background. Inclusion does not imply endorsement of TrustIP.