What is the precision of traceroute and ping location reports?

The IP to location mapping is based on the  MaxMind GeoIP2 City and GeoLite2 City databases which are the best IP-based geolocation services available. 

Because of licensing terms of the databases, if the destination is an IP address, the location for this IP address is taken from the less precise GeoLite2 City database - in all other cases (inner nodes of traceroute and when the final node is a domain name), the more precise GeoIP2 City is used. Precision information for GeoIP2 City is available here:


The error is almost never smaller than 5km so the results have to be taken as a rough estimate only.

In certain cases, the location information corresponds to the company headquarters rather than the actual server location. For instance, for google.com the Californian Mountain View location is always returned even though the actual server is most probably located at a completely different place, depending on where the query was performed from.

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