Frequently Asked Questions

Is this exact? Can you pinpoint where an IP address is?

No, and no honest IP-geolocation service can. When you trace an IP address here, the result is an approximate region derived from public routing and registry data, not a pinpoint. Country-level results are reliable (roughly 95–99% accurate), but precision falls off quickly below that. Every dossier carries a confidence rating so you can see how much weight the estimate deserves.

Treat the map marker as the centre of a probable area, not a destination. It often lands on a city centroid or the network operator's service hub rather than any place connected to the person using the address.

Can someone find my home address from my IP?

No. IP geolocation cannot identify an individual, a household, or a street address. The data behind it maps blocks of addresses to the networks that operate them, and those networks serve whole neighbourhoods, cities, or countries. Only your internet provider can connect an IP address to a subscriber, and it releases that information only under legal process.

We wrote a full explanation of what an IP does and does not reveal in Can someone find my address from my IP?

Why is my city wrong?

City-level geolocation is correct only about 50–75% of the time even on fixed broadband, and mobile, VPN, and satellite connections are frequently wrong by a wide margin. Providers route traffic through regional gateways, so your connection may surface in a city hundreds of kilometres from where you are. Geolocation databases also lag behind network reassignments, sometimes by months.

A wrong city is not a malfunction; it is the expected error band of the technique. The confidence rating and radius on each dossier exist precisely because of this.

What does "LIKELY VPN / PROXY" mean?

Uplink Trace flags an address as likely datacenter, VPN, or proxy infrastructure when the autonomous system operating it is a hosting or anonymization provider rather than a consumer ISP. This is a heuristic drawn from the AS operator's name and profile — hence LIKELY, never proof. Legitimate servers, corporate egress points, and research machines live in the same address ranges.

When you see the flag, read the location data with extra skepticism: the geolocation describes the datacenter, not whoever is connecting through it.

What is an ASN?

An Autonomous System Number identifies a network that manages its own routing on the internet — an ISP, a cloud provider, a university. Google's public DNS, for example, is announced by AS15169. The ASN is often the most trustworthy field in a dossier, because it comes from routing registries rather than location inference: it tells you who operates the address even when the map is vague.

For a longer treatment, see What is an ASN?

Do you store the IP addresses I look up?

No. Lookups are processed in memory against local datasets and are not persisted. We keep no history of which addresses you traced, and there is no account system to attach one to. Standard, short-lived operational logs are described in our privacy policy, which is brief enough to actually read.

Where does the data come from?

Geolocation estimates come from the DB-IP Lite database. Autonomous system names and registration details come from public registry data published by the RIRs, including RIPE NCC. Maps are rendered from OpenStreetMap data with CARTO basemap styling. Reverse DNS is queried live from the public DNS system. All of it is public network data; Uplink Trace assembles it into one dossier and rates its reliability.

How accurate is this?

Country: about 95–99%. Region or state: roughly 55–80%. City: about 50–75% on fixed broadband, and considerably worse for mobile carriers, VPN exits, and satellite links. These figures are consistent across the industry regardless of what any vendor's marketing claims, because they reflect how address blocks are actually allocated and routed.

We publish a detailed breakdown, including why each tier degrades, in How accurate is IP geolocation?

What is the confidence radius?

The radius drawn around a traced position is our estimate of the plausible area containing the network's true service location, based on the connection type and the precision typically achievable for that kind of network. A tight radius on a fixed-line ISP means the estimate is probably within the metro area shown; a wide radius on a mobile carrier means the true point of use could be anywhere inside it, and occasionally outside it. It is an honesty device: the circle is the finding, not the dot.

Can I hide my IP?

You can hide your real address from the sites you visit, with trade-offs. A reputable VPN replaces your IP with the provider's exit address but requires trusting that provider with your traffic. Tor distributes that trust across relays at a significant cost in speed. Web proxies are the weakest option, often unencrypted and ad-injected. None of these hide your activity from the VPN or exit operator itself.

To see what any site currently sees, check What is my IP? before and after connecting.

Is there an API or a rate limit?

There is no public API at present. The web tools are rate-limited to 60 single lookups per minute and 10 bulk jobs per minute, which comfortably covers interactive use and modest bulk work. The limits exist for fair use and to respect our upstream data licences; sustained automated scraping will be throttled. If you have a use case that needs more, reach us through the contact page and describe it.

What do the case-file numbers mean?

Each dossier carries a case-file number in keeping with the signals-intelligence styling of the site. It is a deterministic hash of the IP address — the same address always yields the same number — and it is purely cosmetic. It encodes nothing about you, your session, or the lookup; it is generated on the fly and stored nowhere.