Why is my IP location wrong? The causes, the checks, and where to send a correction

Your IP location is an estimate a database makes about your internet address, and several things push it off. A VPN or iCloud Private Relay may be on, your mobile carrier's gateway may sit in another city, your provider may share or reassign the address, or the database may not have caught up. The checks below tell you which one applies, and the fix depends on it. For Google, report the address with its form, and expect the update to take more than a month.

#Where does an IP location come from?

No internet address carries a location of its own. Databases assign one to each range of addresses, from what the network publishes and what they can measure. A provider can publish a geofeed, a simple file that says which city each of its ranges serves, as RFC 8805 describes. Google reads these feeds. Without one, a database has to estimate.

Sites also mix sources. Google uses your device's location when you allow it, and your IP address otherwise. When the address decided, the line under Google's results says "From your internet address".

#Why is my IP location wrong?

#How do you check your own IP location?

1. Open what is my IP on the device that shows the wrong place. Note the address, the city and the network that owns it.
2. Turn off any VPN, and Private Relay if you use Safari, then check again.
3. Switch between Wi-Fi and mobile data. A change of city points to the network.
4. Look the address up in the free IP lookup and one or two other lookup sites. If they agree, the site that shows you elsewhere uses its own data. If they disagree, a database lags.
5. On Google, scroll to the bottom of the results. "From your internet address" means Google used your IP address.

#How do you fix a wrong IP location?

• Private Relay. On an iPhone, go to Settings, tap your name, then iCloud, Private Relay and IP Address Location. Maintain General Location keeps a nearby city. Use Country and Time Zone shows only a broad region, on purpose.
• Google. Report the address with Google's Report IP problems form. Google says updates to IP addresses may take more than a month.
• Your internet provider. Ask support whether the provider publishes a geofeed and whether your range is listed in the right city. An update to that feed reaches every database that reads it.
• An IP database. The large databases run correction forms. MaxMind, for one, reviews each request against other data and does not promise to accept it.
• A streaming service or a store. Write to its support with your address and the place it shows. It decides from its own database.

#How accurate is IP geolocation?

Accurate where the network publishes its locations. Apple publishes one for every iCloud Private Relay range: on October 24, 2026, its list held 41,747 IPv4 ranges, 97.6 percent of them with a city, across 1,116 US cities. That day we picked 200 US relay addresses at random and looked each one up with FFraud, which still estimated their locations.

Three of the four misses were names for the same place. For one address, Apple's list says Long Island City and FFraud said Queens, the borough Long Island City belongs to:

Apple's list:        172.225.246.178/31,US,US-NY,Long Island City
FFraud, October 24:  "country": "US", "region": "New York", "city": "Queens"
FFraud, October 25:  "country": "US", "region": "New York", "city": "Long Island City"

The fourth was wrong outright: FFraud placed 104.28.137.46 in Germany, and Apple's list puts it in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. On October 25, 2026, FFraud began reading the locations Apple publishes for its relay ranges, and we repeated the test the same day with 200 new random US relay addresses. All 200 answered the country and the city in Apple's list. A home or mobile range with no published location still gets an estimate, so check a "wrong" city against the neighborhoods and towns around you first.

#Why does my location change on mobile data?

Mobile carriers send many customers through one public address with carrier-grade NAT, and that address carries one location for all of them. RFC 6598 sets aside address space for this setup. MaxMind's correction page warns that such an address may be "shared with other people who are spread out over a large geographic area". No form fixes that for one person. On Wi-Fi, your home provider's address decides again.

Private Relay works the same way on purpose. Apple says a relay address shows your coarse, city-level location by default, and its relay addresses can be shared by several users in the same area.

#Questions people ask

If a site blocks you instead of placing you wrong, why is my IP blocked covers the messages and their fixes.