How to test a proxy's location

Step 1: confirm the exit IP

Send a request through the proxy to a service that echoes your address. Do it twice with a rotating username — you should usually see two addresses — and twice with a sticky one, where you should see the same address both times. That one test confirms credentials, targeting and session behaviour together.

Step 2: look up the geolocation

Look the exit IP up in a geolocation service. Most return country, region, city, the network's organisation and its autonomous system number. Some, such as MaxMind's, also return a connection type and a user type — residential, cellular, hosting and so on — which is a quick way to confirm you got the kind of proxy you paid for.

Why geolocation databases disagree

IP geolocation is inference, not a lookup in an official register. Vendors combine registry data, network measurements, operator feeds and user-submitted corrections, and each weighs them differently. MaxMind, one of the most widely used, estimates its own accuracy at 99.8% for countries, about 80% for US states and about 66% for US cities within a 50 km radius — and returns an accuracy radius with each city-level answer.

Some addresses cannot be placed precisely at all. MaxMind notes that mobile network addresses may be used by phones across a large distance, so it may return only a country and state. Carriers also share addresses among many subscribers through carrier-grade NAT, a practice with its own reserved address range (RFC 6598) — see CGNAT. For mobile proxies, a city-level lookup result is not meaningful; we do not offer city targeting there.

Operators can publish self-reported locations for their prefixes as geofeeds in a simple CSV format (RFC 8805). Databases ingest them on their own schedules, so a recently moved range can show an old location in one database and a new one in another.

Test what the target sees

• Load the actual page you will collect through the same proxy string and record the language, currency, country selector and any regional notice.
• Compare with a known baseline from inside that country if you have one.
• For city-specific content — local search results, store availability — check a city name or postcode on the page, not only the IP lookup.
• If the target shows the wrong market, check the site's own country setting and cookies before blaming the IP; many sites remember a previous choice.

City targeting on our rotating pools uses the _city- token from a published list, for example USERNAME_pool-arcfast_country-de_city-berlin. How it applies per pool is on the residential proxies page and in geo-targeting.