ip geolocation accuracy problem

hey everyone, running 'What is My Country?' has been a ride. it's a simple web tool for users to quickly find their current country and IP location. but lately, we've been really struggling with inconsistent and often inaccurate ip geolocation data. it's driving us nuts.

our current setup relies heavily on several third-party ip geolocation APIs for server-side lookups – stuff like ip-api.com, ipinfo.io, and geojs.io. we also use some client-side JS for initial, less critical data, but the core 'What is My Country?' functionality, especially for the ip address lookup part, needs to be solid server-side. the goal is simple: highly accurate country and city detection for our users, period.

the big problem is that different APIs often return wildly conflicting country/city data for the exact same IP. it's not just a slight discrepancy; sometimes it's completely different countries! we get user reports all the time about incorrect locations, especially from mobile users or those on VPNs. it makes our ip address lookup feature look unreliable. take this example for a random IP we've been testing:

// Sample IP: 198.51.100.123 (fictional)
// API 1 (ip-api.com)
{
  "country": "United States",
  "city": "Ashburn",
  "org": "Verizon Business"
}
// API 2 (ipinfo.io)
{
  "country": "Canada",
  "city": "Toronto",
  "org": "Bell Canada"
}
// API 3 (geojs.io)
{
  "country": "United States",
  "city": "New York",
  "org": "Google Cloud"
}

see? it's a mess. how do you even begin to trust this data?

we've tried a few things. initially, we just had simple fallback logic: if API A times out or errors, try API B. that helped with uptime, but not accuracy. then we tried a rudimentary 'majority vote' system for the country, which kinda works if two out of three agree, but it's not robust enough and completely falls apart for city-level data. we also looked into using the browser's navigator.geolocation API, but the privacy concerns, constant user prompts, and its limited accuracy for non-mobile users (where it often just defaults to ISP location anyway) make it a non-starter for our primary ip address lookup. caching helps with speed, sure, but it doesn't fix the underlying accuracy problems.

so, my main questions are: how do you guys effectively reconcile these conflicting ip geolocation results from multiple providers? is there an advanced algorithm or an industry standard for generating a 'confidence score' for IP-based location data when you're doing an ip address lookup? also, what's the best strategy for identifying and handling VPN/proxy IPs to improve true user location accuracy? and any specific recommendations for improving geolocation accuracy for mobile users without solely relying on GPS, since that's often disabled or too intrusive?

really hoping for some practical, technical insights from anyone who's wrestled with this before. waiting for an expert reply.