Vercel now returns city-level IP geolocation for nearly all requests

Vercel has upgraded the IP geolocation built into its platform, and according to a changelog post published October 29, the improvement is already live for every project, with nothing required on the developer side in terms of code or configuration.

What changed

According to Vercel, geolocation lookups now resolve visitor positions with greater network-level detail than before. City-level location data now comes back for nearly all requests, and postal codes are available for roughly 90% of traffic. The company also says the underlying data is refreshed more frequently, so results keep pace when IP blocks change hands or network routes shift — the kind of drift that gradually degrades older geolocation databases.

Nothing to migrate

The rollout is automatic. Existing geolocation request headers behave as they did before, and the geolocation() helper in @vercel/functions continues to return the same fields for both Vercel Functions and Routing Middleware. Applications already reading location data simply start receiving the higher-resolution results; anything that does not use geolocation is unaffected.

Some visitors will resolve differently

More accurate data cuts both ways. Vercel cautions that some visitors will now resolve to a different city or country than they did previously — most often traffic coming from VPNs, hosting providers, and leased IP ranges.

One concrete behavior change concerns subnets announced by a hosting provider from a country other than the one listed in its regional internet registry (RIR) record. Those addresses now resolve to the data center the traffic actually lands in, favoring the real network path over what the registry paperwork says.

For teams that use location data to enforce rules, Vercel recommends testing geo-dependent routes using an address's live network position instead of what its static registry entry says. That is a useful hint that the two can diverge, and that access rules built on older assumptions may behave unexpectedly after the switch.

Why it matters

Location data quietly underpins a lot of application behavior: picking a language and currency, gating content by region, enforcing licensing restrictions, and meeting compliance requirements that depend on where a user is. Vercel's upgrade means customers get city-level and, in most cases, postal-code resolution as a built-in platform feature, without wiring up a separate geolocation provider or adding another API dependency to their stack.

The change also deserves attention before it causes surprises. Because some traffic — especially VPN and hosting-provider traffic — will resolve to new locations, any access control, redirect, or compliance check keyed to geolocation should be re-verified. And the move toward physical termination points over registry records reflects a broader shift in how geolocation works: ownership data is an increasingly poor proxy for where a request actually originates, and platforms that resolve real network paths will increasingly diverge from tools that rely on static registries.