Where visitor locations come from (and how accurate they are)

The location next to a visitor is worked out from their IP address. Nothing asks the browser for its position, and nobody is prompted to share anything.

How accurate it is

Country: usually right. Good enough to act on.

City: often right, sometimes badly wrong. It is the city the address is registered to, which is frequently where the internet provider has infrastructure rather than where the person is. Somebody in a village will show as the nearest large town. Somebody on mobile data may show as a city a hundred miles away, because that is where the network routes.

Anyone on a VPN shows wherever the VPN is, which is the entire point of a VPN and not something we can see through.

Corporate networks show head office, so a whole company can appear to be in one building.

Use it as context, never as fact

The safe way to read it: it is a hint about timezone and language, not a statement about where somebody is.

Fine:

It is nine in the evening there, they will not be expecting a call.

Not fine:

You are in Manchester, so I have applied the northern delivery rate.

The second one is wrong often enough to matter, and being told confidently where you are by a company that has it wrong is unsettling rather than impressive.

It is personal data

An approximate location tied to a person is personal data, and you hold it. It is included when somebody asks for a copy of what you have, and it is removed when somebody is erased. See where your data is stored.

Visitor records are deleted after thirty days regardless of your other retention settings.

Turning it off

Settings → Websites → your site → Privacy switches off live visitors entirely, so nothing is recorded until somebody opens the chat. If the location is the part that bothers you, that is the switch: there is no way to keep the list and drop the location, because the list is largely the location.

Last updated 22 September 2026.