IP Geolocation Lookup
Look up where an IP address is located, country, region, and approximate city, using the MaxMind GeoLite2 database. Useful for log analysis, traffic auditing, and sanity-checking where a request really came from.
How to use
- Enter an IPv4 or IPv6 address.
- Click Run to query the GeoLite2 database.
- Read the location with appropriate skepticism at city level (see accuracy notes).
IP geolocation maps addresses to places using databases built from regional registry allocations, routing data, and ISP information. It is genuinely reliable at country level (98%+ for typical traffic), decent at region level, and approximate at city level, the coordinates returned are the center of an estimated area, not a pinpoint. No IP lookup can identify a street address or an individual. When a database lacks precision it returns a default point that has famously landed innocent farms in lawsuits.
What shifts accuracy further: VPNs and proxies place users at their exit node's location by design. Mobile carrier-grade NAT can put a user hundreds of kilometers from their tower. Corporate networks egress through central offices, placing a Chennai employee in a Mumbai HQ, and cloud IPs locate the datacenter, not any human.
Legitimate uses are everywhere in backend work: spotting that a login came from an unexpected country (the basis of 'new sign-in from' alerts, including Velona's own anomaly detection), segmenting analytics by geography, applying regional content rules, and enriching security logs. Just encode the uncertainty: country-level decisions are safe, city-level decisions should be soft.
This tool requires the GeoLite2 City database to be installed server-side. If it is not, the tool says so honestly rather than guessing (setup instructions are in the platform docs).
Examples
Input: 8.8.8.8
Output: Country: United States · Region: California · City: Mountain View (approximate) · ASN: GoogleInput: 49.205.x.x
Output: Country: India · Region: Telangana · City: Hyderabad (approximate)Frequently asked questions
How accurate is IP geolocation?
Country: very (98%+). Region: good. City: treat as a neighborhood-of-probability, not a fact, often tens of kilometers off, more on mobile networks. It can never identify a household or person.
Why does my own IP show the wrong city?
Your ISP routes traffic through regional gateways, and databases locate the gateway. Mobile networks and CGNAT amplify this. VPNs relocate you entirely, that is their job.
Can I use IP location for compliance or fraud rules?
Country-level, yes, it is standard for content licensing, sanctions screening, and fraud scoring. Combine with other signals for anything user-affecting. Never take irreversible action on city-level data alone.
Why does the tool say the database is unavailable?
It depends on a local MaxMind GeoLite2 City database file. If the server has not installed it, the tool reports that honestly instead of returning made-up locations, ask the operator to complete the free MaxMind setup.
Related tools
Velona is India's INR-native AI API gateway with 300+ models, UPI top-up from ₹10, no foreign card needed. These tools are free forever.