IP geolocation is the art of figuring out a device’s approximate location using its IP address. This is possible because Internet service providers or ISPs assign IP addresses to devices. ISPs have to register all the IP addresses they use.
The registration information contains data about the areas where the ISP will deploy the IP addresses. This information is publicly available, so anyone can check an IP address's data and see where it is being used.
But how accurate is this data? That’s the question we will answer today. But before we discuss that, let’s look at some uses of IP location.
Businesses and security professionals use IP geolocation for the following purposes.
All of those are potent uses of IP geolocation. They enable online businesses to work more smoothly across borders and protect themselves from malicious actors as well.
Generally, IP geolocation is less accurate than GPS. However, unlike GPS, it cannot be turned off. You have to use an IP address to connect to the internet (Check your IP address from here). So, as long as you are online, your approximate location can be traced with your IP address.
Now, let’s see the different levels of accuracy of IP geolocation.
The lowest accuracy of IP geolocation is identifying the country from which the IP address is being used. IP location tools can reliably pinpoint the country of an IP address 95 to 99 percent of the time. This is because IP blocks are usually assigned to an entire country. So, when it comes to country identification, IP location is almost never incorrect.
The accuracy of identifying the state or province from which the IP address is being used is lower. However, it is not unreliable. Most IP locators can find the correct state or province 75 to 85 percent of the time.
Massive countries like the USA, with 52 states, can pose a problem, but IP locators can usually correctly guess the province as well.
This is where the accuracy of IP location declines considerably. If the city is large, then it can be guessed correctly. However, the accuracy is noticeably worse in smaller cities and rural areas.
If the areas are small, it is entirely possible that the device's actual location is in an adjacent village or city.
City-level accuracy is good enough that weather services can use it to predict the weather in your area.
Generally, city-level accuracy can pinpoint the location within 25-30 miles of the actual device.
IP location becomes completely unreliable for pinpointing a device’s location down to the street name and zip code. This is because IP addresses are not assigned via physical locations. They are simply provided to the ISP, and one IP address can be used anywhere within the ISP’s jurisdiction. So, it is simply not possible to know which street or zip code an IP address is used on.
GPS is much better for this kind of accuracy.
We know how IP location works, but several factors can affect its accuracy. These factors can reduce IP location's accuracy and make it less useful than GPS. The details are given below.
VPNs and proxy servers route a device’s traffic through a server in a different region. They use encryption and routing techniques to mask the original IP address of a device. The result is that when you look up their public IP address, you see the IP of the VPN or proxy server instead.
Mobile proxies work similarly, routing traffic through mobile devices' IP addresses, which can be useful for tasks that require location-specific data or simulating user behavior from various regions.
Since those servers are in a different region, the IP location tool will tell you that the device is in that location, too. In reality, it is not. Since there is no way of knowing whether an IP address belongs to a VPN or proxy server, you can never be sure of the results of IP location as well.
ISPs typically do not use the same IP address for a single device. They assign a new public IP address to devices they serve whenever they power on after a while.
While dynamic IPs are often allocated from a specific range associated with a geographic area, they can sometimes be reallocated across different cities or regions depending on the needs of different areas.
Once again, this means you cannot be sure whether an IP location is correct or not based on this information. The IP location tool may detect it is from a certain area, when in reality, it might be used completely in a different area.
When a device connects to the Internet via a mobile network, IP geolocation may report the location of the network’s central routing hub rather than the user's actual location.
This can be misleading, especially in large countries where a mobile user's physical location might be hundreds of miles away from the routing hub.
IPv6 addresses have started becoming more common, but they are still not in such high use that you can create a complete database of their assignment.
This means many databases have incomplete IPv6 assignment information. Therefore, if you try to deduce the location of an IPv6 address, you could get inaccurate data.
Given the factors that influence it, IP geolocation can be pretty inaccurate. However, it still has plenty of uses. There are also ways to make it more accurate that cannot be spoofed so easily, like using GPS in tandem with it.
In fact, many services combine IP geolocation with other data, like GPS signals or Wi-Fi positioning, to improve accuracy. For example, mobile apps often use both IP and GPS data to ensure more precise location tracking.
IP location is accurate enough for the purposes it serves, so it is by no means useless. It can be used reliably to provide services that need no more accuracy than city-level. So, in conclusion, IP location is pretty accurate.