How to Fix IP Geolocation for Your Network

Every geolocation database makes its own guess about where an IP range physically sits, and a freshly leased or newly announced range often comes back pinned to the wrong city — or the wrong country entirely — until someone corrects it. Here's where that data comes from and what actually moves it.

Why geolocation accuracy matters

Location data drives more than you'd expect: search engines and ad networks localise results, streaming and licensing platforms restrict content by region, checkout flows apply local language, currency, and tax rules, fraud systems compare an order's IP location against the billing address, and some services block or rate-limit traffic from countries with high abuse rates. If your range is misattributed, legitimate visitors and your own services can get treated as if they're somewhere they're not.

Where geolocation databases get their data

There's no single authority — every provider blends a few sources, and they rarely agree with each other:

• RIPE whois country attribute: set on the inetnum/inet6num object. It's coarse — one country code per block — and often reflects where the LIR's admin contact sits rather than where the range is actually used.
• RIPE whois geoloc attribute: optional GPS coordinates on the same object. It's advisory only — most commercial databases will override it if their own signals disagree.
• Commercial geolocation databases (MaxMind, IP2Location, DB-IP, IPinfo, Digital Envoy, and others): each combines whois data, routing and traceroute signals, and data submitted by end users or ISPs into its own estimate.

Correcting your listing

Because providers don't share corrections with each other, fixing one doesn't fix the rest. Start with the RIPE Database record for the range — set an accurate country and, if you want finer granularity, a geoloc coordinate — then submit a correction separately to each major geolocation database you care about:

• MaxMind (GeoIP / GeoLite2) — correction request form.
• IP2Location — correction request form.
• DB-IP — correction request form.
• IPinfo — correction request form.
• Digital Envoy (NetAcuity) — correction request form.
• Google — has its own, separate correction form for search and ad-related geolocation.

Publishing a geofeed

A geofeed is a CSV file you publish yourself, listing the geolocation for the ranges you control, so providers can pull accurate data in one pass instead of you filing a correction with each of them individually. The row format is:

• Host the CSV file anywhere reachable over HTTPS.
• Point to it from the RIPE Database by adding a line to the inetnum/inet6num object: remarks: geofeed https://example.com/geofeed.csv.
• Not every provider consumes geofeeds yet, and those that do refresh on their own schedule — daily to weekly, in most cases — so pair it with direct corrections for providers that don't support it.

ip_range,country,region,city,postal_code
192.0.2.0/24,NL,North Holland,Amsterdam,1012

None of this is instant — most databases take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks to pick up a change, and a handful barely update at all without a direct request. If you lease IP space through us, we handle the initial geolocation submission as part of onboarding — reach out at [email protected] if an existing range needs correcting.