[Announcement] Anycast location hints are live in IP pages

General
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At IPinfo, we primarily use active measurements as the foundation of our IP geolocation system. By continuously measuring the network, we can determine where an IP address is actually reachable from and infer its real-world location with high accuracy.

However, this approach presents a unique challenge when it comes to anycast IP addresses.

Anycast IPs are intentionally announced from multiple locations at the same time. As a result, our measurements often show strong location signals in more than one place simultaneously. From a network perspective, this is expected and correct — the same IP may genuinely exist in dozens of locations around the world.

Because our public datasets and APIs require a single location per IP address, we made a deliberate design choice:

  • For anycast IPs, we report the geofeed or WHOIS-registered location as the primary location.
  • This provides a stable, predictable, and standards-based answer, even when the IP is physically present in many places.

Importantly, this does not mean we lose the measurement data.

Internally, IPinfo always retains the full set of observed location hints for anycast IPs. For large-scale anycast deployments, we routinely observe the same IP in dozens of locations, along with timestamped and historical measurement data showing when and where those signals appeared.

Anycast locations hints

Starting in 2026, IPinfo will begin surfacing these anycast location hints directly on IPinfo webpages.

This means that when you look up an anycast IP, you’ll be able to see:

  • That the IP is anycast
  • The multiple locations where we have observed it via active measurements
  • A clearer distinction between the reported location and the observed global presence

You can already see examples of anycast IPs here:

:link: 31.6.14.215 | McMurdo Station, AS215764, & VPN Not Detected - IPinfo.io

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  • The IP’s primary location based on geofeed/WHOIS (e.g., IP geolocated to Antarctica).
  • The anycast flag set to true.
  • Observed locations, e.g., we have seen this IP in 3 countries and 4 cities.
  • Geolocation methodology: We combine active network measurements from our probe network with historical routing and latency data. This lets us identify all observed locations of the IP, while still providing a single primary location for consistency.

Check out more examples:

This update provides greater transparency into how anycast behaves on the internet and helps users better understand why a single “pin on a map” is often insufficient for globally distributed infrastructure.

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