---
title: "Why Is My IP Location Wrong? What an IP Address Reveals"
description: "An IP address points to a database estimate of your city at best, never to your home. Here is why the location comes out wrong and how to verify it."
url: https://proxynet.io/blog/ip-geolocation-accuracy
date: 2026-09-19
author: "Enver Kaya"
category: "Proxies"
lang: en
---

# Why Is My IP Location Wrong? What an IP Address Reveals

You are sitting at home in Izmir, you open a "what is my IP address" site out of curiosity, and it says Istanbul. Another site, at the same moment, says Ankara. The weather page shows the temperature of a different province, and an online shop guesses the wrong delivery city. The first question that comes to mind: is something wrong with my internet, or has someone got into my connection? Neither. What you are looking at is not a measurement but an estimate, and this time the estimate missed.

This post explains how a location is derived from an IP address, why that information stops at city level at best, and why in Türkiye it so often points to another province. We then cover what can and cannot be learned from an IP address, what to do when you worry that "someone knows my IP address", how to verify a wrong location and get it corrected, and how to check the location when you buy a proxy for a specific country or city. There is no code in this post; every step is done in the browser.

> **Note: Short answer**
>
> An IP address carries no location information. Websites look your address up in a third-party location database and show you that database's estimate. The estimate is mostly right at country level, approximate at city level, and never goes down to a street or a home address. The most common reasons for showing up in another city are that the carrier hands out addresses from regional pools, that mobile traffic reaches the internet through an exit point in another province, and that the database record is out of date. Only the internet service provider knows which subscriber an IP address belongs to, and that record is shared only through a legal process.

## Can a location be found from an IP address?

Yes, but in far less detail than people assume. An IP address is the number given to your device or your modem when it connects to the internet; every site you visit sees it. The number itself contains no latitude, no longitude and no province code.

The location is added afterwards, from outside. Companies such as MaxMind, IP2Location and IPinfo build databases showing where the world's IP address blocks are most likely being used. Websites buy one of these databases, or use its free edition, and look the visitor's address up in it. The "Istanbul, Türkiye" you see on the screen is the result of that lookup.

The database makers state the limits of the estimate themselves. On its [geolocation accuracy page](https://support.maxmind.com/hc/en-us/articles/4407630607131-Geolocation-Accuracy), MaxMind says its data is never precise enough to locate a specific household, individual or street address, and that accuracy varies widely by country, by whether the address is cellular or broadband, and by the practices of the ISP.

## How is an IP location determined?

Five steps run in the background before a site can show you a city name:

1. **Address blocks are handed out by registries.** The world's IP addresses are managed by regional internet registries; for Türkiye and Europe that registry is the RIPE NCC. Carriers and hosting companies obtain address blocks from it, and the record holds a company name and a country code.
1. **The carrier places the blocks in its own network.** The carrier decides which block goes to which region and to which group of subscribers. That decision changes over time.
1. **Database companies collect the clues.** Registry records, location files that carriers publish themselves, network measurements and corrections sent in by users are combined. For each block they write a country, a region, a city and usually an "accuracy radius".
1. **The site looks your address up in the database.** When you open the page, the site searches for the IP address the request came from in that day's copy of its database.
1. **The result is written to the screen.** Weather, language selection, delivery city and "stores near you" are filled in from that result.

Even the country code in step one is not a reliable source of location. RIPE's [database documentation](https://docs.db.ripe.net/RPSL-Object-Types/Descriptions-of-Primary-Objects) notes that what this field represents has never been specified: it could be the company's head office, the place where the servers sit, or the home of the end user. That is why database companies do not simply take the registry country and move on; they combine it with other clues.

### How accurate is it at each level?

| Level | How well does the estimate hold? | Why? |
|---|---|---|
| Country | Mostly correct | Address blocks are given to carriers inside a country and rarely move to another one |
| Region, province | Approximate | A carrier can spread the same block over several provinces or move it to another region |
| District, postal code | Weak | The database usually records the centre point of the city and does not know the actual district |
| Street, home address | None | An IP address is given to a connection in the carrier's network, not to a household; the databases hold no street addresses |

Do not let the pin on the map mislead you. Even if the database only knows "Istanbul", the map still has to show a point, so it drops the pin in the middle of the city, and sometimes in the middle of the country.

## Why does my IP address show up in another city?

In Türkiye, most people who ask this question are running into one of the same few causes.

**The carrier hands out addresses from pools, not province by province.** On home broadband, your modem takes an address from the carrier's pool every time it connects. These pools usually serve the subscribers of a region rather than a single province, and the records show the big city the pool is attached to. This is the most common explanation for a subscriber in a small province constantly showing up in Istanbul, Ankara or Izmir.

**On a mobile network, traffic reaches the internet from another province.** When your phone connects over mobile data, the traffic first goes to the carrier's core network and joins the internet at an exit point there. That exit point can be hundreds of kilometres away. Address sharing comes on top of this: the carrier lets a large number of subscribers use a single public IP address at the same time. This setup is called CGNAT, and we cover it in detail in our [guide to CGNAT](/blog/what-is-cgnat). If subscribers in three different provinces use the same address, the database cannot write down one correct city.

**The database record is out of date.** When a carrier moves an address block to another region, or a block is transferred to another company, the databases do not find out straight away. This is why, after getting a new address, you may see the city or even the country of its previous holder.

**Every site looks at a different database.** One site saying Istanbul and another saying Bursa does not mean either of them is broken. The two sites use data from different companies, and those companies' estimates for that block differ.

**There is an intermediary in between.** If a VPN app, a browser extension, a proxy setting or your workplace network is active, sites see the intermediary's address, not yours. How intermediary servers work is explained in [What Is a Proxy Server and How Does It Work?](/blog/what-is-a-proxy-server).

None of these five causes means your connection has been taken over.

## Does an IP address change with location?

It does, because the address belongs to the network you connect to, not to you. On the Wi-Fi at home you appear with an address from your carrier's home broadband pool, on mobile data with one from the mobile pool, and in a café with the one that comes from the café's modem. When you travel to another city, your mobile data address and the city it is registered to may change, but if the exit point stays the same, they may not.

Even if you stay in the same home, your address may not be fixed. On most home subscriptions the address changes when the modem reconnects. We explain which subscriptions keep a fixed address in our post on [static and dynamic IP addresses](/blog/static-ip-vs-dynamic-ip), and the ways to change your address on purpose in our guide on [how to change your IP address](/blog/how-to-change-ip-address).

## What can and cannot be learned from an IP address?

Someone knowing your IP address may sound alarming. Yet every site you visit and the server of every online game you play already sees it. What can be done with the address is limited.

**What can be learned:**

- The name of your internet service provider and the network the address is registered to (the ASN). We explain what that record means in our comparison of [ISP and residential proxies](/blog/isp-vs-residential-proxy).
- An estimate of the connection type: home broadband, mobile line, data center or a known VPN network.
- The country and an approximate city.
- Whether the address appears on blacklists. How that is checked is covered in our post on [IP blacklists](/blog/ip-blacklist).

**What cannot be learned:**

- Your name, your phone number, your home address.
- Which device you use, or the files on it.
- Which sites you visit.
- Where exactly you are standing at that moment.

The record showing which subscriber held an IP address at a given hour sits only with the internet service provider. That record is not public; an ordinary person or a site owner cannot query it, and it is shared only in a legal process at the request of the competent authorities. What the "find an address from an IP" tools on the internet show is nothing more than the database estimate described above; they do not find a person, and they cannot.

## Someone knows my IP address. What should I do?

If someone in a game, a chat or a forum has told you they know your IP address, there is no need to panic. This short list is enough:

1. **Do not overrate the threat.** The person saying "I found your house" has most likely seen the name of your carrier and an approximate city.
1. **Restart the modem.** If your address is dynamic, switching the modem off and back on after a few minutes gives you a new address, and nothing ties you to the old one.
1. **Change the password of the modem's admin page.** If the factory password is still in place, that is the real risk. Open the modem's management page and renew both the admin password and the Wi-Fi password.
1. **Close port forwards you do not need.** If a forward you opened for a game or a camera is no longer in use, delete it.
1. **Protect the truly personal information.** What helps someone find a person is usually not the IP address but what that person has written about themselves.
1. **If the threat continues, keep a record.** Save screenshots, use the platform's reporting route, and contact the authorities if necessary.

## Do sites work out your location from the IP address alone?

No, and that is the answer to the puzzle "my IP is in the wrong city, but the map shows me right at my house". The map app on your phone does not take the location from the IP address but from GPS, nearby Wi-Fi networks and cell towers. This method is far more precise, but it asks for your permission; that is the location prompt you see in the browser.

On its [help page about how location is used in search results](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/179386?hl=en), Google lists four sources: the device's location, the home and work addresses saved in your account, your past activity, and the IP address. Its wording for the IP address also sums up the limit of the estimate: addresses are "roughly" based on geography and give sites some information about your general area.

This distinction has a practical consequence. A proxy or VPN changes only the IP address; the location permission you gave the browser, the address saved in your account, the device's time zone and its language setting stay as they are. The browser can also expose your real address by another route; how to check for that is covered in [WebRTC and DNS Leaks: What They Are and How to Stop Them](/blog/webrtc-dns-leak).

## How do you verify and correct a wrong location?

First check whether there really is an error, then move on to getting it fixed.

1. **Switch off intermediaries.** Turn off the VPN app, the proxy extension and any workplace connection, then reload the page.
1. **Look at two separate sites.** Compare the result from a "what is my IP address" site with a second source such as [ipinfo.io](https://ipinfo.io/). If the results differ, the issue is not on your side but in the difference between databases.
1. **Look at the country.** If the country is right and the city is a neighbouring or a big one, this is the expected state and there is nothing to correct.
1. **Compare Wi-Fi with mobile data.** If the two show different cities, you are leaving from two separate networks and two separate pools.
1. **For an issue on one site only, check that site's settings.** On most shopping and weather sites the city can be picked by hand.

If the error is at country level and it stops you from using a service, there are two routes. The first is to send a correction request to the database company; MaxMind, for example, has a public [data correction form](https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip-data-correction-request), and accepted corrections go into the next database release. The second, and the more lasting one, is for the carrier or the address holder to publish its own location file.

That file is called a geofeed, and its format is defined in [RFC 8805](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8805.html). The network owner publishes a plain text file listing a country, a region and a city for each address block; database companies read the file and update their records. [RFC 9632](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9632.html) in turn specifies how the address of this file is written into the block's record at the registry. RFC 8805 still states plainly that those who consume the data may treat the file as a hint only and may prefer other sources. As a home user you cannot publish this file yourself; what you can do is report the situation to your carrier's support line.

## What should you look at when buying a location-targeted proxy?

This section is for teams whose work requires them to connect from a specific country or city. To see which language, price and ad a site shows to a visitor in Germany, you need to look at it from an IP address there. And the location of the proxy you buy is whatever the database used by the site on the other end says it is.

- **Country targeting is dependable, city targeting is approximate.** City-level targeting means the address is registered to that city. The target site's database may show the same address in a neighbouring city. A test that expects district-level certainty cannot be done with an IP address.
- **Verify the location through the eyes of the target site.** Looking at a single IP check site is not enough. Check the country in two separate sources, then look at which language and currency the target site shows you. All the steps are in [Is My Proxy Working? How to Test a Proxy](/blog/how-to-test-a-proxy).
- **The type of address affects the quality of the location record.** The location record of home broadband addresses rests on the carrier's layout, and sites see these addresses as ordinary visitors. [Residential Proxy](https://proxynet.io/residential-proxy) offers this kind of address with country and city selection. If you need to appear in the same city for weeks, [ISP Proxy](https://proxynet.io/static-isp-residential-proxy), whose address does not change, is the better fit.
- **Match the browser clues as well.** If the IP address says Germany, the time zone says Istanbul and the browser language is Turkish, the site finds you inconsistent. In the test profile, set the language and time zone to the target country and keep the location permission off.

Typical uses for this work are:

- [Localization testing](/localization): do the translation, the currency and the local content appear correctly in the right country?
- [Ad verification](/ad-verification): is the campaign really running in the targeted country and city?
- [App testing](/app-testing): does the app open the same way in different markets, and do the region-specific screens work?
- To see how search results change by country, read our guide on [searching Google from a different country](/blog/google-search-different-country).

You can see our exit points inside Türkiye and the available cities on our [Türkiye location page](/locations/turkiye). One note: location targeting is for seeing your own site, ad or app through the eyes of another market. Getting around the regional restrictions of licensed streaming platforms breaks those platforms' terms of use and is not the subject of this post.

## Common mistakes

- **Taking the pin on the map for a home address.** The pin is the centre of the estimated area. It usually lands on a city square or in the middle of the country.
- **Deciding after looking at a single site.** The location changes from site to site; do not say "my IP is wrong" before checking two sources.
- **Trusting "find an address from an IP" tools.** These tools show the same database estimate. They do not find people; give neither money nor personal information to a tool that claims it does.
- **Turning the proxy on and leaving the location permission on.** If you have granted the browser location access, the site looks at the real location reported by the device, not at the IP address.

## Decision guide

| Your situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Your IP address shows up in a neighbouring or a big city | Nothing; if the country is right, this is the expected state |
| Two sites show two different cities | The sites use different databases; look at the country and ignore the city |
| The country looks wrong and a VPN or proxy is on | Switch the intermediary off and check again |
| The country looks wrong and there is no intermediary | Report it to your carrier and use the database company's correction form |
| A site picks the wrong delivery city or weather | Pick the city by hand in the site's own settings |
| Someone says they know your IP address | Restart the modem, change the modem password, do not share personal information |
| You need to run tests from a specific country | Buy a country-targeted proxy and verify the location in two sources and on the target site |
| You need to appear in the same city for weeks | Choose a proxy type whose address does not change and check the location once a month |

## Frequently asked questions

### Does an IP address give an exact location?

No. An IP address shows a country and an approximate city at most. Street, building or flat information does not exist in location databases. When your phone shows you in exactly the right spot on a map, that comes from GPS and nearby Wi-Fi networks, not from the IP address.

### Why does my IP address always show Istanbul or Ankara?

Carriers usually hand out addresses from regional pools, and in the databases those pools are recorded under the big city they are attached to. On mobile data, the traffic also joins the internet at the carrier's exit point in that city. The same pattern shows up in other countries with their own large cities.

### Can a wrong location harm me?

Usually not. The most common results are the wrong weather, a wrong delivery city suggestion and local search results tuned to another city; all of them can be fixed by hand in the site's settings. If the country looks wrong, some services may ask for extra verification; in that case you need to report it to your carrier and to the database company.

### Can someone find my home with my IP address?

No. The information reachable from an IP address is the name of your carrier and an approximate city. The record of which subscriber the address belongs to sits only with your internet service provider and is shared with the competent authorities only in a legal process.

### How does my location look when I use a VPN or a proxy?

Sites see the intermediary server's address, not yours, and the location is that address's record in the database. The location permission you gave the browser and the address saved in your account are not affected by the intermediary. The difference between the two tools is explained in [Proxy vs. VPN: Which One and When?](/blog/proxy-vs-vpn).

### I bought a city-targeted proxy. Why does it show another city?

The city target shows that the address is registered to that city in the provider's source. If the site you are looking at uses another database, it may show the same address in a neighbouring city. Check a second source. If the country does not match either, send your provider the address and the site you checked.

## Summary

A location can be found from an IP address, but what is found is not a measurement; it is a third-party database's estimate. The estimate is mostly right at country level, stays approximate at city level, and never goes down to a home address. In Türkiye, the reasons for showing up in another province are usually the carrier's regional address pools, the distant exit points of the mobile network, and records that are updated with a delay. To be sure of your location, switch off intermediaries and look at two separate sources; if the country is right, there is nothing to correct. If your work requires you to connect from a specific country or city, verify the location through the eyes of the target site and take a look at our [proxy services](/proxy), which offer country and city selection.