{"id":137,"date":"2026-10-18T16:40:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-18T16:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.whatismyipaddressinquire.com\/blog\/?p=137"},"modified":"2026-10-14T03:01:03","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T03:01:03","slug":"reading-lat-long-from-ip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.whatismyipaddressinquire.com\/blog\/reading-lat-long-from-ip\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Latitude and Longitude From an IP Lookup"},"content":{"rendered":"

TL;DR:<\/strong> Latitude and longitude from an IP lookup usually mark a database centroid for a city or provider area. They look precise and often are not. Read them next to the city field on What Is My Location<\/a>, not as a walking route.<\/p>\n

Six decimal places of false comfort<\/h2>\n

A journalist overlaid IP-derived coordinates on a satellite map and wrote that a source \u201cwas at\u201d a particular intersection. The point was the published centroid for a \/16 that covered half a suburb. The intersection was coincidental. Precision in display is not precision in measurement.<\/p>\n

Decimal degrees tempt readers into treating the pair like a survey stake. Geolocation vendors often store one point per large block because storing per-subscriber coordinates would be wrong ethically and impossible operationally. When you export those numbers into GIS software, the software will happily zoom to rooftop level anyway. The map UI is doing you no favors unless you change the symbology.<\/p>\n

Where the numbers come from<\/h2>\n

Providers store a representative point for many addresses in a block. Sometimes it is a city hall area, sometimes a POP, sometimes an old corporate HQ that no longer owns the space. Your request does not trigger a fresh survey of your street. It retrieves whatever point is on file at query time.<\/p>\n