IP Geolocation Lookup
Paste a public IP or domain and read back the country, city, ASN and ISP, with two providers compared and honest accuracy notes.
This IP geolocation lookup takes a public IP or a domain and tells you roughly where it sits and who runs the network behind it. Type an address, or a hostname that resolves to one, and it reads back the country, region, city, ASN, ISP, organization and time zone, then scores how confident that read really is. It queries two providers and lines them up side by side, so you can see exactly where they disagree before you trust a city. It is the tool I keep open when a login looks off or analytics light up from a country I do not sell to. Trust the country and the ASN, treat the street level as a guess.
Queries run through the PeopleAreGeek lookup service. We log nothing.
Live network utility
Paste a public IP or a domain. I'll tell you roughly where it sits and who runs the network behind it. Two providers, side by side, including the bits where they flat-out disagree, plus the ASN and ISP. And I'm honest about how far off the city can land. Why did I build it? Because I kept squinting at raw JSON at 1 a.m. trying to work out whether a weird login was a real user or just someone's VPN exit. This is the cleaner version of that squinting.
What IP geolocation is good at
Honest pitch: this maps an address to a likely country, region, city, network owner and time zone. I reach for it when I need context, fast. A login pops up from a country where none of my users live. A VPN exit needs a sanity check. Or a customer swears the site keeps serving them the wrong region. None of it is magic. It's stitched together from public routing tables, the regional registries, and commercial databases that are only ever as fresh as their last sync, which is sometimes weeks ago.
For day-to-day work, that context earns its keep. The ASN alone tells me a ton. Residential ISP? Cloud platform? A university block, a mobile carrier? You can usually read it off the org name. City's handy for catching a routing mismatch. And honestly, the time zone field is the one I'd defend hardest, it's bailed me out more than once when the logs and a user's story just wouldn't line up. Maybe that's a personal bias. What I never do is treat any of it as someone's actual front door.
How to use this lookup responsibly
- Trust the country and the ASN. The street-level stuff? Don't. It's a guess wearing a fact's clothes.
- VPN, proxy, cloud, mobile: those almost never point at the actual human on the other end. Just expect it going in.
- When the answer actually matters, check both providers. They disagree more often than you'd think.
- Never make a real call on IP location alone. Not an identity, not a ban, nothing security-sensitive.
- Keep your logs lean. And before you paste a screenshot into a ticket? Remember an IP can count as personal data.
Why the same IP can show different locations
This one trips people up constantly. Ranges get sold off and shuffled between providers. A company might announce the same route from two different cities at once. VPNs funnel thousands of people through a handful of shared exit nodes, and mobile carriers pull the same trick with a few gateways. Then there's timing: every database refreshes on its own schedule, so one's still reading last month's data while another already caught the change. That's the whole reason you'll see ipwho.is name a city while ipapi.co only commits to a region. Or why a corporate connection drops you on the headquarters instead of the remote worker who's actually logged in from their kitchen.
Useful troubleshooting examples
A few that come up for me all the time. Someone locked out of an allowlisted admin panel? Check their real public IP and ASN here first, before you go poking holes in the firewall. Nine times out of ten their IP just rotated overnight. Analytics suddenly lighting up with traffic from a country you don't sell to? Run it, see whether a CDN or a VPN is sitting in the middle. And when a login genuinely looks dodgy, please don't convict it on geography alone. Pair the IP with the device history and the auth logs, look at how the account's been behaving lately. Where someone seems to be is just one input. It doesn't get to decide the case on its own.
Sources and further reading
Frequently asked questions
Can this find the exact address of an IP?
No. And please don't let anyone tell you different. Best case, you get an approximate network location, usually down to a city or a region. There's no home address tucked away in there, no GPS pin. That's a TV-cop thing. Real routing data just doesn't carry it.
Can I lookup a private IP?
Not really, and it's got nothing to do with the tool. Addresses like 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x and 172.16-31.x.x live inside your LAN. They never touch the public internet. So no global database has the faintest idea where they sit. That same 192.168.1.1? It's sitting in a million homes right now, mine included.
Why does a cloud IP show a different city?
Because cloud and CDN providers run enormous blocks of addresses and shuffle traffic around inside them however suits them. What comes back might be where the network is registered. Might be the data center itself, the routing region, or some broad corporate HQ that means nothing to you. All of those are common. None is wrong, exactly. They're each just a different angle on the same block.
How accurate is IP geolocation?
Country? Almost always right. City or region? Often enough, though I wouldn't bet the firewall on it. Street address, forget it. What you're really looking at is where the ISP registered the block, not where your device physically sits. A VPN or a mobile carrier can shove that answer hundreds of miles off the mark. The annoying part is it stays confident the whole time.
Why does my IP show the wrong city?
Usually because the database pins your whole address block to wherever your ISP registered or routes it. And that's often a regional hub two cities over, not your actual town. Mobile data or carrier-grade NAT makes it fuzzier still. My own phone once popped up in a city I've genuinely never set foot in. Felt weird seeing that.
Can I geolocate any IP or domain?
Any public IP, yes. Hand it a domain and I'll resolve that to an IP first, then look the IP up. The dead ends are the private and reserved ranges. Nothing public to find there, so the lookup just shrugs.