How Accurate Is IP Geolocation? Country vs. City

Accuracy is a ladder, not a number

How accurate IP geolocation is depends entirely on how closely you zoom. MaxMind — whose free database powers a large share of lookup sites — documents it roughly as: country above 99%, region or state 55–80%, city 20–75%. Street level is simply not possible from an IP.

So “is it accurate” has three honest answers at once: extremely (country), usually (region), and often not (city).

What the “99% accurate” claims measure

When a vendor advertises 99%, that figure almost always describes country-level resolution on a curated test set. It says nothing about city precision for your region, your ISP or your connection type.

And when a vendor has no confident city for a block, many products fall back to a region or country centroid — which inflates apparent coverage while telling you nothing about a real place.

What makes your own result better or worse

Accuracy isn’t random — it follows the type of connection:

• Fixed broadband in a large city — the best case; the city is often right.
• Suburban and rural connections — usually resolve to the ISP’s nearest aggregation hub.
• Mobile networks — traffic exits at carrier gateways; expect region-level accuracy at best.
• CGNAT — one shared IP for thousands of users pins everyone to the pool’s location.
• VPNs and proxies — the result describes the exit server precisely, and you not at all.
• Free vs commercial databases — free datasets like GeoLite2 lag commercial ones noticeably at city level.

Coordinates deserve special skepticism

The latitude and longitude in a lookup are a representative point for an address block — typically a city or region centroid with an implied radius of tens of kilometers. That’s fine for analytics and wrong as a position.

Rendering that point as a precise map pin is exactly how a database estimate turns into a false conclusion. Read it as “this area”, never “this spot”.

How to test your own IP

Run a lookup and compare three things against reality: the country (should match), the city (may be your ISP’s hub — check whether the named city is where your provider concentrates its infrastructure), and the ISP/ASN field (it tells you whose network the estimate actually describes).

Then check the thing that matters more than the city name: whether your IP’s region agrees with your browser’s timezone and language. Websites weigh that consistency far more than street-level precision.