What Is a Geofeed?

A geofeed is a text file that describes the location of your network's IP addresses. It lists the country, region and city for each block of addresses. IP geolocation providers read it and use the data to improve their databases.

Want to publish one now? Skip to the steps.

The format is defined in RFC 8805 (opens in a new tab), and the way to point to the file from a registry entry in RFC 9632 (opens in a new tab).

Why geofeeds exist

A website that shows you prices in your currency, or blocks a country, looks your IP address up in a geolocation database. Those databases are built from many sources, including routing data and guesswork, and they are often wrong about addresses that have just moved to a new network or a new country.

There are two older ways to correct them: write to each provider yourself, or put a geoloc attribute, which holds one latitude and longitude, in your address block's registry entry. A geofeed gives the networks that run the addresses one more way. You publish the location once, in one file, and every provider that reads geofeeds can pick it up.

A geofeed example

A geofeed is a CSV file with one line for each block of addresses:

# Example geofeed (RFC 8805), published by an address holder.
# Each line: ip_prefix (the block), alpha2code (the country), region,
# city, postal_code (deprecated, left empty).
# Lines that start with a hash are comments and blank lines are ignored.
# Made with a free tool: https://www.lir.services/geofeed-generator/
# Last updated: 2026-10-26T13:42:16Z
192.0.2.0/24,GB,GB-ENG,London,
198.51.100.0/24,DE,DE-BE,Berlin,
2001:db8::/32,FR,,,
203.0.113.0/24,,,,

Each line reads: prefix, country, region, city, postal code. In the example the last field is empty on every line, because the postal code is deprecated. Only the first field is required.

Field	What it holds
Prefix	One IP address, or a block in CIDR notation, IPv4 or IPv6
Country	A two-letter country code (ISO 3166-1), such as GB or DE
Region	A region code (ISO 3166-2), such as GB-ENG
City	The city name, as plain text with no comma in it
Postal code	Deprecated: new feeds should not include it

A few more rules from RFC 8805:

• A line that starts with # is a comment, and blank lines are ignored. A comment header is a good place to say what the file is and when it was last updated, as the example does.
• The file is UTF-8 text.
• A line with a prefix and nothing else says the block has no location to publish. The last line in the example does this.
• A block may sit inside another block, and the most specific line is the best match for an address. The same block twice is an error.

The examples above use blocks reserved for documentation, so they are not real addresses.

Build your own with the Geofeed Generator

How to create and publish a geofeed

1. Write the file with a line for each block you want located, and keep it up to date as the addresses move.
2. Host it at an HTTPS address that the providers can fetch, on your own website or anywhere else you control.
3. Point to it from the registry. In the RIPE Database, add a geofeed: attribute with the address of the file to the inetnum entry (IPv4) or inet6num entry (IPv6) of the block. RFC 9632 (opens in a new tab) describes how readers find it there. An entry can have one geofeed address.

The RIPE NCC is not a geolocation provider. It only stores the address in the registry entry and does not read the file or check that it exists. The geolocation providers read the address from the database and fetch the file themselves.

RFC 9632 also describes an optional way to sign the file with RPKI, so that a reader can check that it comes from the holder of the addresses.

Who reads geofeeds, and how often

A geofeed is only as useful as the number of geolocation providers that read it, and not every one of them does. RFC 8805 recommends that anyone collecting feeds refresh them at least weekly, and no more often than would cause the publisher problems, so a change takes some time to arrive. Our guide to IP geolocation lists the main providers and what they support.

Privacy

A geofeed is meant to give a coarse location, such as a city. You can leave out any field, or a whole block. RFC 8805 says postal codes can be very specific, and that they must not be published without the consent of the people they locate. In the UK, for example, a postcode can point to a single street, or even a single block of flats.

Common questions

Do I need a geofeed?

Not if you have a handful of addresses and the databases already have them right. It helps when you hold many blocks, move them between locations, or keep finding the same wrong location in the databases.

Is a geofeed the same as the geoloc attribute?

No. The geoloc attribute puts one latitude and longitude in the registry entry of a block. A geofeed is a separate file that can cover many blocks, with the country, region and city for each.

Will a geofeed change my location straight away?

No. Each provider fetches the file on its own schedule and decides whether to use it.

Is a geofeed an official standard?

RFC 8805, the file format, is an informational document. RFC 9632 (August 2024, which replaced RFC 9092), the way to find the file from a registry entry, is on the IETF's standards track.

What if I lease addresses?

An IP address lease from us includes the geo-location submissions to the main providers (MaxMind, IP2Location, DB-IP and a few others) for the location you choose. See what IP address leasing is.