Your IP location is wrong because an IP address contains no geographic information at all. Location is inferred from registry records, routing data, ISP geofeeds and latency measurements, and when that evidence is missing the fallback is a regional centroid.
There is no location inside an IP address
An IPv4 header contains a version field, a length, flags, a time to live, a protocol number, a checksum, and the source and destination addresses. There is no field for country, city, latitude or longitude. The same is true of IPv6. Every geolocation result you have ever seen is an inference layered on top of an identifier that was never designed to carry location.
That inference is a lookup into a database that maps address ranges to places. The database is compiled by commercial vendors and by a handful of open projects, and it is only as correct as the evidence they can gather. When the evidence is thin, they still return an answer, because a product that returns nothing is harder to sell than one that returns something plausible.
This single fact explains almost every complaint about IP location. It is not a measurement that failed. It is an estimate presented without its confidence interval.
How geolocation databases are actually built
Vendors combine several sources, weighted by how reliable each has proven for a given range.
Registry records come first. Each Regional Internet Registry publishes WHOIS data for allocations, including a registered address for the organisation holding the block. This is why a range assigned to a national ISP frequently geolocates to that ISP's corporate headquarters rather than to the customer, and why business ranges are often placed at a billing address.
Routing data narrows it. BGP announcements reveal which network originates a prefix and which exchange points it appears at, which constrains a block to a region even when the registry record is uninformative.
Self-published geofeeds are the most accurate source when they exist. RFC 8805 defines a simple CSV format that a network operator can publish, mapping their own prefixes to country, region and city. Operators who care about their customers being placed correctly publish one, and vendors ingest it. Its absence is a major reason smaller ISPs are mislocated.
Active measurement fills gaps. Vendors run latency probes from known locations and triangulate: a round trip of 4 milliseconds from a Dallas probe places the target within a few hundred kilometres of Dallas at most, because light in fibre does not travel faster than about 200 kilometres per millisecond round trip. This is coarse but it catches gross errors.
Finally, user corrections and partner data. Vendors accept correction submissions and buy signals from applications that also have GPS, which is how city-level accuracy improves for popular consumer ranges over time.
You can check whether your ISP publishes a geofeed. Look for a geofeed: line in the WHOIS record for your prefix: whois -h whois.arin.net 203.0.113.45 | grep -i geofeed. If the line exists, the URL it points to is the authoritative source for how your range should be located.
The five reasons yours is wrong
Understanding which of these applies to you determines whether it is fixable.
Address reassignment is the most common. Your ISP moved your address from one pool to another, or reclaimed it from a customer in another city, and the database has not caught up. Update cycles for commercial databases are weekly at best; free tiers lag further. The address is genuinely in your city; the record says otherwise.
Centroid fallback produces the most dramatic errors. When a vendor knows the country but not the city, it returns the country's geographic centre. For the United States this historically resolved to a point in Kansas near the town of Potwin, which resulted in a rural farm receiving years of visits from people tracing stolen phones and fraud complaints. Vendors have since moved default coordinates to bodies of water and started publishing accuracy radii, but centroid fallback still happens; if your reported location is suspiciously central to a country or state, this is why.
Carrier aggregation affects mobile and CGNAT users. Traffic from a large region exits through a small number of gateways, so every subscriber in several states can share an address whose location is the gateway. A phone in Sacramento can geolocate to Los Angeles because that is where the carrier's egress sits.
Anycast breaks the model entirely. A single address announced from dozens of locations at once, which is how AS13335 Cloudflare and public resolvers operate, has no single location. Databases assign one anyway.
VPNs and proxies are working correctly when they show the wrong place. The exit server's location is the answer, and if that server's range is stale in the database, you may see a third city that is neither where you are nor where the server is.
How accurate is it, in real numbers
Country-level accuracy for major commercial databases is consistently reported at 95 to 99 percent for fixed broadband. That is the level services can rely on, and it is why country-based licensing and compliance decisions use IP geolocation while delivery-address decisions do not.
City-level accuracy is a different story. Within the United States, vendors typically report correct-city rates in the range of 55 to 80 percent within a 50 kilometre radius for residential fixed-line addresses. The variance across ISPs is enormous: a large cable operator with a published geofeed can approach 90 percent, while a regional wireless ISP with no geofeed can be below 40 percent.
Mobile is substantially worse, commonly cited between 30 and 60 percent at city level, for the aggregation reason above. IPv6 ranges also underperform their IPv4 equivalents because they are newer and have accumulated less corrective feedback.
Postal code accuracy should be treated as noise. Any service claiming ZIP-level precision from an IP address alone is reporting the centroid of whatever larger area it actually resolved. If a page shows your street or your postcode correctly, it is almost certainly using the browser Geolocation API, Wi-Fi network scanning, or a stored address from a previous session, not your IP.
Latency is a hard physical bound you can use as a sanity check. ping a server whose location you know. A round-trip time of 10 milliseconds puts you within roughly 1,000 kilometres of it and usually much closer. If a site claims you are in a city that ping times make impossible, the database is wrong.
How to get your location corrected
Corrections must go to the database vendors, not to the website showing the wrong result. Websites license data; they do not maintain it. Submitting a correction to one site fixes nothing anywhere else.
Start by identifying which vendor the site uses, which is often visible in a page's network requests or documented in its help pages. Then submit to the major vendors directly. MaxMind, IP2Location, ipinfo, IPregistry and DB-IP all operate public correction forms. Expect a propagation delay of one to four weeks after acceptance, because sites update their local copies on their own schedules.
If you control the address range, publish a geofeed. This is the single highest-leverage action available and it fixes the problem at the source for every vendor that ingests RFC 8805 data. Host a CSV at a stable HTTPS URL and reference it from your WHOIS record.
If you are a residential customer, contact your ISP and ask whether they publish a geofeed and whether your prefix is correctly represented in it. Support staff frequently will not know what you are asking; the request needs to reach the network operations team. This is slow but permanent, whereas per-vendor submissions decay as ranges are reallocated.
In the meantime, override where you can. Browsers grant the Geolocation API precedence over IP inference, so allowing location access on a site that asks fixes local search, weather and store finders immediately. Setting a delivery postcode in a retailer's account does the same for commerce. Neither changes what the underlying database says about you.
# a minimal RFC 8805 geofeed
# prefix,country,region,city,postal
203.0.113.0/24,US,US-TX,Austin,
2001:db8:1000::/48,US,US-TX,Austin,
# reference it from the WHOIS record for the range
# geofeed: https://example.net/geofeed.csvFrequently asked
Why does my IP say I am in a different state?
Most often because your ISP's address pool is registered to a corporate or regional address in that state, or because your traffic exits through an aggregation point there. The address is correct; the database's association is stale or coarse. Mobile connections and smaller regional ISPs show this pattern most frequently.
Can I change my IP location without a VPN?
Not directly, because the location is a record in someone else's database. You can submit a correction to the major geolocation vendors, ask your ISP to publish or fix an RFC 8805 geofeed, or grant browser location permission so sites use the Geolocation API instead of your IP. Those are the only legitimate levers.
Why does a website know my exact street when my IP is wrong?
It is not using your IP. Precise location comes from the browser Geolocation API, which uses GPS on mobile and Wi-Fi network scanning on desktop, and requires a permission prompt you may have accepted previously. Revoke it in your browser's site settings if you want the site to fall back to IP inference.
Does IP geolocation work for IPv6?
Yes, but less accurately. IPv6 allocations are newer, have fewer accumulated corrections, and are frequently assigned in large blocks whose internal structure vendors cannot resolve. If a site places you correctly some days and not others on a dual-stack connection, check which protocol each session used.
How long does a geolocation correction take to appear?
Vendors typically process submissions within a few business days, but sites using the data refresh their local copies weekly or monthly, and some far less often. Plan on two to four weeks before the change is widely visible, and longer for services that embed a static database in a shipped application.