Cloudflare HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY sometimes returning wrong countries

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I'm trying to get the visitor's country code from Cloudflare through the header HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY. When I use this, I receive the correct country code I am visiting the site from, although this code can change at times.

For example; my country code is supposed to be LK which is shown correctly throughout my site for majority of a session, but sometimes if I navigate to a subpage, open the site in incognito / different browser, change network connections or view from another machine, the code may change, sometimes I get a different code for each page I visit.

There is no pattern to the country code changing hence why I use the word "sometimes" and seems to be random.

I'm not using any proxies or VPNs on top of my internet connection, and my IP remains the same whenever the issue arises.

Does anyone have to faintest idea as to why these codes might be changing?

cloudflare country-codes ip
1 Answers

The entire technical foundation for geolocation-by-IP is fairly weak and not a precise science. It's just based on large data accumulations, and all large data accumulations have some margin of error. It's entirely possible you're on an ISP which may sometimes route requests through one IP internally and sometimes through another, and that one IP is associated with one country but the other happens to be associated with another country in that large database, rightly or wrongly. Or any number of other factors why CloudFlare may see your request coming from one IP or another at times, and/or why that IP may be listed as one country or another in their database. Maybe the IP changed recently, and that updated database hasn't been rolled out to all of CloudFlare's edge servers yet, and sometimes you're hitting a server with an outdated geo-IP database.

You've just found an edge case that flipflops because… reasons.

user_4760
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