# IP Geolocation through Reverse DNS

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.04288 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04288/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [GNN-Geo: A Graph Neural Network-based Fine-grained IP geolocation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10767/) (2021)
- [HMCGeo: IP Region Prediction Based on Hierarchical Multi-label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16392/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

IP Geolocation databases are widely used in online services to map end user IP addresses to their geographical locations. However, they use proprietary geolocation methods and in some cases they have poor accuracy. We propose a systematic approach to use publicly accessible reverse DNS hostnames for geolocating IP addresses. Our method is designed to be combined with other geolocation data sources. We cast the task as a machine learning problem where for a given hostname, we generate and rank a list of potential location candidates. We evaluate our approach against three state of the art academic baselines and two state of the art commercial IP geolocation databases. We show that our work significantly outperforms the academic baselines, and is complementary and competitive with commercial databases. To aid reproducibility, we open source our entire approach.