Where is my IP address located?
This is a guess made from your IP address, not a reading from your device. Country is usually right. City is right often enough to be unsettling and wrong often enough to be useless, because the database maps your provider's equipment rather than you. A mobile connection can place you in another city entirely.
The approximate location tied to your public IP is shown above. This is IP geolocation: a lookup that maps your IP to a country, region and often a city, using databases of which provider owns which address blocks and where. It needs no GPS and no permission.
IP geolocation is an estimate, not a fix. It reflects where your provider registers the address, which can be your neighbourhood, a nearby city, or a regional hub dozens of kilometres away. On mobile networks it can be especially loose because carriers route traffic through central gateways.
This is different from the precise Geolocation API location, which uses GPS, Wi-Fi and cell signals and asks your permission. IP location is coarse but silent; GPS location is precise but consented.
How a website reads this
This is the exact call a page makes. Nothing else is involved, and nothing is sent anywhere: the value is read in your browser and displayed to you.
fetch('/api/ip') returning the platform's geo headersThe hosting platform annotates each incoming request with a city, region and country it looked up from the IP. No GPS is involved and no permission is asked, because nothing is read from your device.
- Needs your permission
- No, it is read silently
- Can it be faked
- Partly. Follows the IP address. Route through another country and the estimate follows you there, which is exactly how streaming region checks are defeated.
- Contribution to a fingerprint
- Not counted. Not part of the fingerprint estimate: it is derived from the IP address, so counting it as well would count the same fact twice. How we estimate this.
What you should know
Why sites collect it
Sites use IP location to show local content and currency, enforce regional licensing and legal rules, route you to the nearest server, and flag logins from unexpected countries as possible fraud.
Privacy implications
IP location exposes your rough whereabouts to every site without asking, which is why it feels intrusive even though it is imprecise. A VPN changes it wholesale, making you appear wherever the VPN server is. It is one of the most common reasons people use a VPN.
How to change or hide it
Use a VPN or Tor to change the location that sites derive from your IP; they will see the exit server's location instead of yours. There is no way to stop sites from doing the lookup, only to change what your IP points to.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my IP location wrong?
It maps to where your provider registers the IP, not your exact spot, so it is often a nearby city or a provider hub. It is an estimate by design.
Can a website see my exact address from my IP?
No. IP geolocation gives an approximate area, not a street address. Precise location requires the consented Geolocation API, which uses GPS and nearby signals.
Sources
Browser behaviour changes and vendors cap these values differently, so the claims above that are not self-evident are checked against the specifications and vendor documentation below.
Last checked on . How these values are measured and estimated is set out on the methodology page.
Something wrong here? Tell us what your browser reports and it gets corrected.