A VPN connection can show a perfectly correct IP address while the city attached to it is wrong, outdated, or simply a guess. This is not a sign of a broken service or a privacy leak. It is a structural feature of how IP lookup tools work, and understanding the distinction matters more than most users realize when they try to judge whether their connection is actually private.
The confusion starts because an IP address and a geographic label are produced by entirely different processes. The IP address itself is a technical fact: a number assigned to a device or server, visible to any site or tool that receives a connection from it. The city name, by contrast, comes from a geolocation database that estimates a likely location based on registration records, infrastructure data, and inference - not from any live signal sent by the VPN. These databases are maintained by third parties, updated on their own schedules, and frequently wrong at the city level even when they are correct at the country level. As general resources on connection diagnostics explain, including material in BuyBestVPN's own documentation, these two data points should be evaluated separately rather than treated as a single verification step. BuyBestVPN's own documentation
What the Raw IP Actually Tells You
The raw address is the only piece of information a remote server reliably receives. It reveals whether a connection is using IPv4 or IPv6, which network block it belongs to, and which organization - often the VPN provider - controls that block. This is useful and verifiable. A user can confirm that traffic is leaving through the VPN's server rather than their home network simply by checking that the address has changed and that it belongs to the expected provider's infrastructure. None of this requires trusting a city estimate at all.
Why the City Guess Can Diverge
Geolocation databases assign cities using commercial mapping data that is not always current. A server physically located in one city may be registered under the address of a data center's headquarters in another. IPv6 allocations, in particular, are often mapped with less precision than older IPv4 ranges, since adoption and database coverage for IPv6 still lag behind. A mismatch between the displayed city and the server's real location does not mean the VPN failed to encrypt traffic or that an IP leaked. It simply means the lookup tool's estimate did not align with reality - something that happens constantly, VPN or not.
The Risk of Reading Too Much Into a Match
The reverse error is just as common. A city label that matches expectations does not confirm that a connection is private or that no leak occurred. DNS requests, WebRTC calls, or IPv6 traffic can bypass a VPN tunnel entirely while the primary IP check still looks clean, because that check only examines one connection path at a time. Genuine verification requires testing DNS resolution, checking for IPv6 leaks separately from IPv4, and confirming the organization listed against the IP address - not relying on whether a city name feels correct.
A More Reliable Way to Check
- Record the raw IP address and compare it against the VPN server's published location, not a third-party guess.
- Check IPv4 and IPv6 results independently, since many leaks occur specifically through the protocol not being tested.
- Treat the city field as a rough estimate, useful for sanity checks but not as proof of anything on its own.
- Run a dedicated DNS leak test alongside any IP check, since geolocation tools do not evaluate DNS behavior.
Separating these layers turns a vague feeling of reassurance or alarm into an actual diagnosis. The IP address tells you what network you are using. The city label tells you what a database guessed. Keeping the two apart is the simplest way to avoid both false alarms and false confidence when assessing a VPN connection.