This page summarizes the most common questions I have received and have seen from users. If you have additional questions, or suggestions for things to add here, contact the author at this contact page.
IP geolocation is a very imprecise science. Some ISPs provide more precise location data than others. Some don’t provide any information, at all.
What you see might be best guesses by Cloudflare and its partners, or wrong info by ISPs. Different geolocation data providers might also show totally different data.
For example, Cloudflare IPs almost always point to San Francisco, in the United States of America, but they most likely are assigned to some other location globally.
This probably deserves a full page by itself, but to simplify things you can say that actual distance you can calculate on a map is not always the same path internet traffic might take.
Each ISP routes its own data as it decides, due to a lot of different factors:
This does apply to your user ISP, but also to Cloudflare itself, and all network partners in the middle, if there are any.
The list you can see on this website, indicating “In Service” and/or “Discontinued” POPs doesn’t mean that the specific location works, or even serves traffic at all. To track outages, always refer to the official Cloudflare Status Page.