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IP geolocation

Definition IP geolocation maps a network address to a registered place. Country is usually right. A city is a guess. A street is not in the data.

IP geolocation is a lookup from an address the browser used to the place that address block is registered. Databases built from registries, ISP data, and measurements power the lookup. They are strong at country, weaker at region, and weak at city. They do not return a house number or a name.

A VPN appears at the exit node. A phone often appears at a carrier gateway. An office appears as one location for many people. Those are not bugs you can average away. They are the resolution of the data. What city-level geolocation gets wrong walks through the decisions that still survive it. A street address is not one of them.

MapMyVisitors does the lookup from a database kept on the server, not by sending the address to another company to enrich. The result is the dot on the map and the country in the table. Use the country, over a real range, as in tracking visitors by country. Use the dot as a picture, not as a coordinate you would navigate to.