HACKER Q&A
📣 jyundt

How can I get Google to fix their reported geolocation of my IP address?


I was in a Central American country for a week in January. After returning to the US, Google products like Search and YouTube are flagging my IP address as from this Central American country. This is happening for every device in my home, across multiple Google Accounts regardless of owner/account/OS:

- Android (phones and an Nvidia Shield)

- iOS

- MacOS

- Linux

Unfortunately this is preventing my wife and I from accessing YouTube content that is geo-locked and we are getting search results in Spanish (plus a bunch of other unexpected behavior with Google services).

I've contacted YouTube Premium support and Google One support, neither could figure this out and suggested I "ask the community".

My best guess: my US IP address was flagged as from this Central American county while I was abroad because I had to VPN back to this IP address while traveling. On mobile, if I disconnect from my wireless network and use 5G/LTE, everything "just works"; I can access US YouTube content and search results are in English + the correct geo.

Based on the suggestion from Google support, I posted this information to the Community help site[0] hoping that someone will be able to help. Additionally I’ve used this Google form[1] to “Report IP Problems”, but this can supposedly take more than a month. Given how one way this form feels, my confidence with it is relatively low.

Has anyone ever encountered this before? Any suggestions? How can I get Google to mark my IP address as "from the US"? Unfortunately I feel like I’m in some weird Kafkaesque nightmare.

A few things to note: MaxMind / GeoIP lookups have always correctly identified my IP address as "from the US", this seems to be limited to just Google services. I have a static IP from my ISP and I would prefer to avoid getting a new IP from my ISP. I also don’t want to have some other unlucky customer get this cursed faux Central American IP address. However, if neither Google nor HN can figure this out, I’ll contact my ISP and request a new IP.

[0] https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/148526373

[1] https://support.google.com/websearch/workflow/9308722

edit: formatting

  👤 patoh Accepted Answer ✓
Consistently open and interact Google maps while connected to the network in question. Google reports back the GPS/Neighbouring wifi AP's location, from that IP address. This is likely how they identified the IP was incorrectly in Central American in the first place

That along with reporting the incorrect geoip data to google should clear it up over time. However I have seen this take from 1 week to 2 months to improve. The more users / devices using Google maps, the better chance you will have with Google auto correcting the location.