Most IP geolocation products give you a pin. A pin is easy to plot and easy to trust, and that is the problem. An IP address is not a property of a device. It is a routing label the operator lends you for as long as you are connected. When you disconnect, it goes back into the pool. Nothing written in the address says where anybody is.
So the honest answer cannot be a single point. It has to have extent. That extent is what BigDataCloud publishes as the confidence area. This post is about how to use the fields on a lookup, not a methodology paper. For the field definition, see What is Confidence Area?. For how the separate confidence value is scored, see How to interpret Confidence Value.
How to use the fields
A lookup returns country, a confidence area, and a point. They are not interchangeable, and they are not equally strong. Use them in this order.
Country first, for compliance. Licensing, tax, in-country content, and geo-restriction should read the country field. Address space is allocated nationally, so country is established independently. It is never read off the polygon. If the decision is “which country is this?”, stop at country.
Then the polygon, if the decision needs extent. Fraud scoring, risk checks, and “is this still the same network object?” are extent questions. The confidence area is a coarse estimate of the reach of the network that delivers traffic to the address: where else this address may appear if it is shared or reassigned. It is not a legal boundary and not a guarantee, and it says nothing about how the address is distributed inside the shape.
Do not derive country, region or city from the shape. Use the country field, then the other locality fields (region, city, postcode) for localisation and analytics. Near a border the polygon will spill. That spill is a property of a coarse drawing, not a second nationality.
Large and high confidence is a normal pair. Polygon size is not a quality measure. Confidence comes from two independent processes agreeing: service-area estimation and field evidence. A large area with a high confidence value is common on shared and dynamic consumer networks. A small area is not a more precise device location. Do not filter “good” results by polygon area.
When the address may not describe a person, read the Hazard Report, not a smaller polygon. The main proactive metric is hostingLikelihood, a score from 0 to 10, with isHostingAsn as the companion: high means the address sits in hosting, data-centre or cloud infrastructure, i.e. no eyeball. That is what we publish instead of a complete VPN list. See What is Hosting Likelihood?. isKnownAsVpn, isKnownAsProxy and isKnownAsTorServer are reactive “known as” flags. They fire when the address is already on a list. They miss anything that has not been listed yet. If the hosting score is high or a known-as flag is set, the coordinates and the area describe infrastructure or an exit, not the person. IP geolocation is not a person-tracker, a building locator, or a substitute for GPS, and it should not be.
Country, area, and pin are not equally strong
The same lookup returns three location objects. On the Daily IP Geolocation Accuracy Report they score differently. The figures below are the IPv4 global window for 19 August 2026 (2.24 million distinct addresses). They are one day’s public exam, not a service level. Read the live table for the current window.
Country is the strongest signal. Correct country was 99.0% on wired networks and 98.2% on all networks. Country is typically about 99% on wired and about 98% overall. Hosting and mixed sit lower, at 84.0%.
The confidence area is next: did the GPS sample fall inside the polygon? 96.4% on all networks, 97.3% on wired, 97.2% on cellular, 79.3% on hosting and mixed. So: over 95% on all, wired and cellular. Hosting and mixed sit lower, at 79.3%. On the same table, MaxMind GeoLite2’s circle contained the GPS sample 56.2% of the time on all networks.
The pin is a third, weaker object. How often it is “close” depends on how far you allow from the GPS. Same day, all networks: 38.7% within 5 km, 67.5% within 50 km, 75.2% within 100 km, 94.7% within 500 km. The pin is usually under 95% unless you allow a very large distance. Do not pick one of those percentages and treat it as if it were country.
A worked example
A lookup comes back as: country Australia, confidence high, a large confidence area over the east coast that spills a short way across a state line and out to sea, hostingLikelihood 0, not known as a VPN or proxy.
For a licensing or in-country content rule, use country. The answer is Australia. The spill is the shape being coarse, not a second country.
For a fraud or risk check, large and high together is a normal pair on a shared or dynamic consumer address. Ask whether the activity is consistent with this service area, not whether it matches the pin. If hostingLikelihood is high, or the address is known as a VPN or proxy, stop treating the coordinates as the person: they describe the infrastructure or the exit. If the same account later appears well outside the area and those signals are quiet, that is the inconsistency to score.
What the area is, and how it differs from a circle
The confidence area is derived from how the delivery network is built, not from a list of places the address happened to turn up. It is a service-area estimate. That is a different object from the circle most of the category publishes.
MaxMind’s accuracy radius is a circle around their point. Their own docs describe it as the radius inside which they have a stated confidence that the device sits, and their blog is explicit that the address is no more likely at the centre than anywhere else in the circle. That circle is an error bar around a point guess. It is not the reach of a real network, which is why it cannot follow a coastline or a service boundary.
IPinfo’s public story is probes: ping, traceroute, handshakes. Most consumer addresses never answer a ping. Probes can only measure infrastructure and servers that respond. The responder (server or router) can be many hundreds of kilometres from the consumers or from the area it serves. It can be overseas. So a consumer IP’s published point is almost never a measurement of that address. A probe reply does not become a consumer location or a service area. The only lucky consumer measurement is a home box that answers a ping (a server or a CPE) and that IPinfo actually found, because they can sweep routed IPv4 space but cannot scan IPv6, so even a neighbour running an IPv6 server is almost certainly never discovered.
IPinfo Plus/Max and the extended DB publish a radius as an estimated location accuracy radius in kilometres. Their own community post treats that radius as statistical confidence in the coordinate. The lowest values are typical of data centres and public or government buildings, the things that answer. They also say only a fraction of the internet replies to measurement and the rest is inferred. That radius is the same object as MaxMind’s accuracy radius: an error bar around a point. It is not a service area, and it is not a different concept.
Use the circle as an error bar around a point. Use the confidence area as the reach of the delivery network. Do not substitute one object for another in a decision.
Why the area can look large
A large area is often read as a weakness. It is not. On the consumer internet, a large service area is the usual case.
A home address is lent. You get it when you connect, and it goes back in the pool when you disconnect. Tomorrow the same address may be someone else in the same city, or further away. The honest answer has to cover where else that address may appear, not only where it was last seen.
Many consumer networks share one public address across many households at once (CGNAT, or carrier share). The address is the shared door, not the house. The shared door is often a city, not a building. A pin on one household is a story. The area is the city those households can sit in.
On cellular, the public address is often a gateway. The phone can move a long way, even to another city, on the same address. The last stretch of delivery sits inside the operator and is not visible from the internet. What you can see is the gateway’s reach, not the handset’s street.
So the honest area is the reach of that delivery network: where else this address may appear. A large, high-confidence area is a normal pair on shared and dynamic consumer networks, not a failed pinpoint.
We draw the shape generously on purpose. It is kept coarse so that it carries the real uncertainty rather than disguising it. The size is a decision. We do not pretend a smaller shape is more accurate.
When the address stops describing the person
Two common cases. Both are products working as designed, not failures of geolocation.
The first is redirection, through a VPN, a proxy, or other hosting infrastructure. Traffic leaves from a machine in a data centre or from an intermediate exit, so the address describes that machine and says nothing about the person. Use hostingLikelihood and isHostingAsn for that. The known-as VPN, proxy and Tor flags are a second, reactive check: useful when they fire, silent about everything that has not yet been listed.
The second is roaming. A phone can be abroad on a home account, with data carried back and entering the internet at home. The address stays with the home operator. There is no roam field on this lookup. There is isCellular on the Hazard Report: whether the requested IP was detected as utilised within a cellular network. That is not a roam flag. Most cellular lookups are people at home on a mobile network. The home-routed roam case is possible when isCellular is true. Then country, pin and area still describe the home network, not the person.
In both cases the person could be anywhere. We do not draw a worldwide shape that looks like an answer while being noise. For hosting and known anonymisers, the Hazard Report is the signal. For roaming, the honest read is that the lookup is still about the home operator.
A patented service-area estimate
The confidence area is BigDataCloud’s object. It is a patented estimate of the reach of the delivery network (US 11,792,110 B2; CN 112119614 B9). MaxMind publishes an area too: a circle, an accuracy radius around a point. The unique claim is the object itself: a service-area polygon from how the network is built, not an accuracy radius around a point.
The area is not a hull of sightings and not a heat map. The middle is not more likely than the edge.
What to read next
For the delivery-network approach, read The Next Generation IP Geolocation Service. For accuracy limits by network type, read How accurate can IP Geolocation get?. Current public figures are on the Daily IP Geolocation Accuracy Report.
To return the polygon with the point estimate, use the IP Address Geolocation with Confidence Area API. To get hostingLikelihood and the known-as flags on the same lookup, use the Confidence Area and Hazard Report API.