IP Geolocation accuracy
6/1/2023 Daily accuracy report - Kenya

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of a precise IP address geolocation. Often, it is the only entirely non-intrusive tool available to indicate where our online customers/visitors are coming from and learn how we can serve them better by catering to their geographical properties.

However, IP geolocation cannot be 100% accurate and has limitations. Some of which we've described in our How accurate can IP Geolocation get? blog post.

Moreover, estimating an overall IP Geolocation accuracy is a complex problem. We have to put it up to test against a massive range of IP addresses with diverse locations, sources, and providers to test the accuracy comprehensively. Ideally, we should try it against our potential customer base, where IP addresses are associated with real people, just like our visitors are. Typically, this ground-truth reference data is rare and must be harvested thoughtfully.

So, where are we getting our reference data from?

1. First, we kindly ask our website visitors to share their location with us. You may have noticed it when you visited our What is my IP Address? page.
2. Then we provide a range of iOS and Android apps, such as These apps are the best in range and must-have tools for every network professional and enthusiast. We provide these apps for absolutely free and without ads. In exchange and only with the user's consent, we collect location information associated with the public IP address used. 
3. We also offer a FREE Client-side reverse geocoding API. It is an industry-first free reverse geocoding and IP Geolocation API without access rate or volume limitations. We only enforce a strict client-side use policy, ensuring that the requested location will likely reflect the caller's IP address and actual service location.

At all times, BigDataCloud refrains from gathering any data that could establish a connection between the user's IP address or location and their actual identity. We do not seek to obtain information about end-users or their activities, nor do we engage in surveillance or store personal data associated with IP addresses, even for internal purposes. It should be noted that we do not possess any such information, and we do not sell any personal data.

What do we do with the received data?

Whenever an IP address/location pair is received on any collection channels, we instantly carry out the IP Geolocation check against our latest dataset and store the accuracy results. We also perform the same check against the competitive datasets and automatically generate a comprehensive report presented below.

Noticeably, the data we collect is perfectly suitable to represent real-life internet users, website visitors, mobile app users and IoT devices around the world. However, it is less likely to include infrastructural segments such as network routers or public websites.

We also go to great lengths to make sure we exclude abusers. However, we allow VPN and other anonymisers, likely in the same way and proportion one would expect from the traffic hitting a random website or another public service.

We often get several location samples for the same IP address, for example, when the user is on the move. We take the best hit point accuracy record to report, so it is based on distinct IP addresses regardless of the number of occurrences.

We operate precisely the same algorithm and sample categorisation for all datasets, constantly comparing apples to apples.