Data quality
What our IP data is built from, and where it stops being certain
Every geolocation result is an inference. An IP address is a routing identifier, not a coordinate, so the honest question is not "is it accurate" but "which fields are trustworthy enough for the decision I am about to make". This page answers that in detail, including the parts most vendors leave out of the datasheet.
Six layers of evidence
Registry allocations
Refresh: DailyThe five regional internet registries publish who holds each block and under which country it was registered. This is the slowest-moving and most dependable layer, and it is why country results are the ones you can safely build rules on.
BGP routing
Refresh: ContinuousPublic route collectors show which autonomous system actually announces a prefix today. Registration and announcement disagree more often than people expect — a block registered in one country can be carried by an operator on another continent.
Network measurement
Refresh: ContinuousRound-trip times from distributed vantage points put a physical ceiling on how far a host can be. Light in fibre covers roughly 200 km per millisecond, so latency alone rules out large parts of the map.
Operator geofeeds and rDNS
Refresh: WeeklyMany ISPs publish self-declared geofeeds, and reverse DNS names frequently encode a city or facility code. Both are hints rather than proof, weighted lower than measurement when they conflict.
Anonymiser and hosting intelligence
Refresh: HourlyVPN exits, TOR relays, open proxies, residential relay pools and cloud ranges change constantly. This is the layer that decays fastest and the main reason we serve data live instead of shipping a monthly file.
Abuse reporting
Refresh: Continuous, with decayAddresses seen in scraping, credential stuffing and spam. Signals age out deliberately: an address burned months ago is usually a clean household today, and permanent blacklists punish the wrong people.
Field-by-field confidence
| Country | Very reliable. Registry and routing usually agree, and disagreements are detectable. |
|---|---|
| Region / state | Good on fixed broadband, unreliable on mobile and corporate networks. |
| City | Treat as a probable metro area, never as a verified location. Always read the accuracy radius alongside it. |
| Coordinates | The centroid of an allocation, not a device position. Never display them as a household. |
| ASN and operator | Ownership rather than estimation, so it is close to exact. |
| Connection type | Highly reliable, and the field most fraud rules should actually key on. |
| Anonymiser flags | Strong for datacenter, VPN and TOR. Residential relays remain the hardest category in the industry, ours included. |
Validate it on your own traffic
You already hold ground truth that no vendor has: shipping addresses, billing postcodes, declared timezones. Sample a few thousand recent sessions, resolve the addresses, and compare. Record country match, region match and great-circle distance for city, then break the results down by connection type.
Do not read the blended average. Segment it. Fixed broadband will look excellent, mobile will look poor, and hosting will look nonsensical — all three are expected, and knowing the split is what lets you write rules that survive contact with real users.
A vendor-published accuracy percentage is a median over a population that is not yours. An afternoon of measurement on your own logs is worth more than any datasheet, including ours.
Coverage
Both IPv4 and IPv6 are resolved through the same endpoint and return the same fields. IPv6 coverage is genuinely better in some respects, because there is far less address sharing, and weaker in others, because fewer operators publish granular geofeeds for their prefixes. Reserved, private and documentation ranges are identified explicitly rather than guessed at, so an internal address never comes back as a plausible-looking city.
Corrections
If you operate a network and our result is wrong, tell us. Publishing an RFC 8805 geofeed is the fastest fix, because it flows into the next refresh automatically. Otherwise send the prefix and the correct location through the contact form and we will review it against the other layers.