IP address lookup accuracy help?

hey everyone, i just launched my very first web tool, a simple 'what is my ip address' site. super excited about it, but i'm running into a really perplexing issue that's got me scratching my head.

the main problem is that users are reporting some pretty inconsistent and sometimes outright wrong geolocation data for their ip addresses. i'm talking about the country and city information. it's not 100% accurate, and that's a big concern for something like an ip address lookup tool. sometimes it shows the correct city, other times it's a neighboring one, or even a completely different country.

i've tried a bunch of things already. first, i checked all my server logs for any obvious errors, but everything looks fine on that front. then, i tested it myself from various browsers like chrome and firefox, and also different devices – my laptop, my phone – and the same inconsistency persists. i even used a few different VPNs to simulate locations, and while sometimes it's spot on, other times it's off by a really significant margin. i also integrated a couple of popular ip geolocation APIs, maxmind and ipinfo.io, hoping they would solve it, but i'm still seeing these discrepancies even with those.

so, my main questions are: how do the really established 'what is my ip' tools manage to achieve such near 100% accuracy for geolocation? are there specific database providers or methods that are considered the gold standard for truly reliable ip address lookup? and what common mistakes do beginners like me typically make that lead to these accuracy issues? i'm really new to all this, so i'm probably missing something fundamental.

i'm really scratching my head here trying to figure this out. any advice or shared experiences would be incredibly helpful. anyone faced this before?