Geo databases

IP location wrong? How to fix it

There is no official city for an IP address. Regional registries record who was allocated the block and, sometimes, a country. The pin you are looking at was inferred by a vendor: MaxMind, IPinfo, IP2Location, DB-IP, ipapi.is, or Google for Google’s own products. They use registry country, routing, geofeeds, and user reports, and they do not update on the same day. The same address can read Mumbai in one database and Delhi in another. This page is how to tell a bad guess from a guess that is supposed to be coarse, and how to file a correction when a correction is the right tool.

Check the address before you correct it

Start with the address websites actually see. That is the number on the homepage, on the connection whose city is wrong, with any VPN turned off if you wanted the ISP’s address. Then open the location checker and compare the free sources. If they already agree with the city you believe, the product that looks wrong is using a different database, and you correct that vendor rather than all of them.

Write down whether the address is stable. Reboot the router, or reconnect the phone, and look again. A dynamic address that changes tomorrow will take your correction with it, or the correction will land on whoever receives the address next. CGNAT and mobile pools are the extreme case: the address is shared, so a pin for your flat is a pin for strangers.

When the pin is supposed to be coarse

Do not file a house-level correction for any of these:

• A mobile CGNAT address. In India the shared Jio or Airtel pool is often pinned to a hub such as Mumbai or Delhi. That is a property of the pool. The India page explains why.
• An anycast address, such as 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8. It is announced in many cities. One city is a lie.
• A VPN exit or a Tor exit. The pin is the server, which is working as designed. Correcting it to your house would publish your house as the location of everyone else on that exit.
• An address you do not operate and cannot vouch for. Vendors reject corrections they cannot defend, and a fictional street address makes the next review harder.

When you should correct it

Correct a database when you operate the network, or when the address is a stable public address at a place you can describe honestly. A whole prefix belongs in an RFC 8805 geofeed, generated if you want with the geofeed tool. A single stable address can go through the forms below. File the prefix you announce, not a single host you hope the vendor will generalize. Include a role address at a domain you control if the form asks for email. A free webmail address is easier to ignore.

MaxMind

MaxMind’s correction form is at maxmind.com/en/geoip-location-correction. You can submit an address or a prefix, a country, a region, a city, and a postal code. MaxMind says it will not accept a correction for an anycast address, for an address that moves around a large area, or where the result would not describe the people who use the address. GeoJS on this site’s location checker uses MaxMind GeoLite for comparison, so this form is the path for that row. Many other products resell MaxMind and will not move until MaxMind does.

IP2Location

IP2Location does not publish a separate correction wizard. The public path is the contact form, or email to update@ip2location.com, with the address or prefix, the location you can vouch for, and how you know. Treat it as a request a person reads, not as a form that updates the database when you click submit. Say whether you operate the network.

IPinfo

IPinfo’s form is at ipinfo.io/corrections. They accept a one-time correction or a geofeed. A lot of sites buy this data, so a fix here shows up in products that never name IPinfo on the page. This site links the form and does not query IPinfo’s API.

DB-IP

DB-IP’s own FAQ is the instruction: use the report link on an address page, send a batch through the contact form, or publish a geofeed. The FAQ itself is at db-ip.com/faq.php. Rows from DB-IP on this site’s location checker are credited as IP Geolocation by DB-IP under CC BY 4.0. Correcting DB-IP does not correct MaxMind.

Google

Google’s country for Google products is a separate database. The public form is Report IP problems. Google describes it as a report that an address is causing Google products to show the wrong country. They say an update can take more than a month, that they do not reply to each report, and that a report they do not act on is not kept. It is not a city-level editor.

Network operators have a second path. Google has told ISPs to submit an RFC 8805 feed in the ISP portal at isp.google.com/geo_feed. Access to that portal is not automatic. The geofeed is still worth publishing, because other vendors read the same file from your own URL. A correction filed only with MaxMind does not move Google.

After you submit

Nothing updates in the hour. Check the location tool again in a week, and again after the interval the vendor named. If you published a geofeed, confirm the URL returns the raw file over HTTPS with no login, then submit that same URL on the forms that ask for one. Keep a copy of what you sent. Do not pay a third party who offers to “push your IP to Google” as a side channel. The forms above are the public ones, and they are free.