Seeing the wrong city — sometimes wildly wrong, a different state or even country — for your own IP address is common and rarely a sign of anything broken on your end. It usually comes down to one of a short list of well-understood causes.
Work through these in order
1. Check whether a VPN or proxy is active
This is the most common cause by far. If you have a VPN client running — even one you forgot about, or one your employer's device manages — your location will correctly show the VPN exit server's location, not your own. Disconnect it and re-check.
2. Consider your ISP's gateway routing
Some ISPs, particularly larger ones, route traffic through regional gateways that don't match your actual city. Your address might be technically registered to an ISP office hundreds of kilometers away — this is a real limitation of how IP geolocation works, not an error specific to your connection. See How IP Geolocation Works.
3. Check if you're on mobile data
Mobile carriers frequently use carrier-grade NAT, routing many customers through shared regional gateway addresses — your phone's IP-reported location can be your carrier's regional hub rather than your literal position.
4. Consider a stale database
Address block reassignments happen faster than every geolocation provider's database updates. If an address recently changed ISPs or regions, some lookup services may still show the previous owner's location until their data refreshes on its own schedule.
What you can actually do about it
Beyond the checks above, there's limited self-service correction available for IP geolocation — it's determined by the provider's database, not something you can edit directly. Some providers offer a correction-request process for genuinely stale entries; NetRiskScan's own correction path is on our Contact page.
FAQ
Will this affect what content or services I can access?
Potentially — some services use IP geolocation to determine regional availability or currency, so a wrong location can occasionally cause the wrong regional experience even though nothing is actually broken about your connection.