How does geolocating with IP addresses work?

Question

There are many publicly available services that post only their IP addressGoogle, Quad9, and Cloudflare are biggies with 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9, and 1.1.1.1How do they geolocate users so they're doing DNS resolution "locally" instead of from wherever that IP actually points?

gregjor · Accepted Answer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_geolocation

incomingpain · Answer

They don't geolocate. You setup the DNS servers in various datacenters around the world, then BGP anycast the address.
So there are many dns servers with the virtual ip of 8.8.8.8.
Then the way bgp works, you will route to the nearest path. Which will tend to be geologically close.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1546