Q2: Why Is My Site Coming from California?

Response

Hi Customer, I can see how this might look confusing — you’re in London, but the IP trace shows California. Let me reassure you that your visitors are still being served by the closest Cloudflare data center. The IP addresses you see don’t always reflect the exact data center location. What’s happening is that Cloudflare announces a set of IPs everywhere in the world, and depending on the lookup method, it may look like California even though requests are being routed to London or a nearby region. I confirmed this by checking Cloudflare’s routing and using traceroute tools, which show the actual traffic path. From what I see, your site is indeed being served locally, so performance won’t be impacted. Think of it as a global phone number — no matter what number shows, the call is routed to the nearest "office." Hope that clears it up! Warm regards,

Thought Process

Tools that show IP locations often use the registered ownership location (California) rather than the physical data center serving the content. The traffic routing, however, is optimized and served from the closest Cloudflare PoP (Point of Presence).

Tools I Would Use