IP Address Lookup

Nothing about an IP address encodes a place. Geolocation is inference: providers start from the regional internet registry records that say which organisation was allocated a block, add routing announcements showing where that block is reachable from, then layer on latency measurements, reverse DNS naming conventions, and location data volunteered by partners and users. The output is a best guess with a confidence radius.

Because each provider buys and weights those inputs differently, and refreshes on its own schedule, the same address can resolve to different cities depending on who you ask. That is not a bug in one of them. It is the honest shape of the underlying data, and most lookup sites hide it by showing you a single answer from a single database.

This tool queries seven at once and shows all of them, tinting any cell that disagrees with the consensus. If six providers say Frankfurt and one says Amsterdam, you can see that immediately instead of trusting whichever one you happened to open.

The most common cause is staleness. Address blocks are traded, reassigned and re-registered constantly. When an ISP moves a range from one city to another, or a hosting provider sells a block, some databases pick up the change within days and others take a quarter. For a few months afterwards, the same address genuinely has two defensible answers.

The second cause is that some networks have no meaningful location at all. Mobile carriers route subscribers through a handful of national gateways, so a phone in one city geolocates to another. Large corporate networks and universities backhaul traffic to a central exit. Anycast addresses are announced from dozens of places simultaneously and are, by design, everywhere at once.

This is why a wide coordinate spread is useful information rather than noise. VPN exits, proxy pools and freshly reassigned ranges consistently produce the largest disagreements, so the spread figure often tells you more about what kind of address you are looking at than any individual city does.

For compliance and licensing work, use the country and region, which are reliable, and ignore the city, which is not. For fraud review, treat a wide spread and a hosting organisation as signals worth escalating rather than as a location. For debugging a proxy, the useful question is whether the exit lands where you expect — a job the proxy checker does directly for whole lists.

If you are looking up your own address rather than someone else’s, What Is My IP adds the parts this page deliberately leaves out: proxy, VPN and Tor detection, abuse reputation, and a comparison between your browser timezone and the one your IP implies.

And if the city matters because you need traffic to originate somewhere specific, no lookup will fix that — you need an exit in the right place. Evomi’s residential proxies support country, region and city targeting across 190+ countries, and you can verify the result with this very tool.