Four Reasons IP Geolocation Fails and How to Handle Each One
IP geolocation lookups can fail for four distinct reasons, yet most code only accounts for one: private address ranges. The other three — unallocated address space, allocated but unrouted blocks, and addresses that resolve to misleading locations — often go undetected in logs. The IANA Special-Purpose Address Registries for IPv4 and IPv6 provide an authoritative reference, including a 'Globally Reachable' flag that reliably indicates whether a given block can ever be geolocated. Filtering these ranges locally before making an API call eliminates unnecessary round trips and prevents silent data corruption in analytics or fraud detection systems. Each failure mode requires different handling, and distinguishing between them takes roughly fifteen lines of code alongside a reference table.
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