Last week, I visited Tucson, Arizona for five days. The entire time I was there, every time I was using cellular for Internet on my AT&T-based iPhone, all Safari autocomplete suggestions (which come from Google) were in Japanese:
And if I navigated to google.com (in either Safari or Chrome), it seemed to think I was in Japan:
It turns out other people have reported the similar problems, on Reddit and on a Google support forum. After I replied on the Reddit discussion, several people confirmed that they were in other parts of Arizona
I spent quite a while testing various scenarios.
- This only happened while using cellular. The moment I switched to WiFi, the problem went away.
- This happened anywhere in Tucson.
- I could not find any other apps that had this problem. Even the Google app seemed to working correctly.
- I had not recently changed any iPhone settings.
- WhatIsMyIPAddress.com showed my IP address’s location as San Diego, CA. That’s not Tucson, but it doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable location to show.
Here is what WhatIsMyIPAddress.com showed:
I had hoped to have time to debug it by connecting my iPhone to my Mac via USB and using the Charles web debugging proxy or some other tool to watch network traffic, but I did not have a chance to do so.
After getting home, I gave as much information as I could to ChatGPT o3. Its answer is:
- AT&T recently started handing out different IP addresses in Arizona and New Mexico
- Those IP addresses used to belong to SoftBank Japan
- Google may have stale data in their mapping from IPv6 to geolocation
Here is more from ChatGPT:
Putting those pieces together, the most plausible explanation is a bad IP‑geolocation entry inside Google’s own real‑time location database for a block (or blocks) of AT&T mobile addresses.
Google keeps its own mapping of “IP prefix → country & region” that it uses for Search, Ads, YouTube, Autocomplete, etc. It is separate from the commercial databases that sites like WhatIsMyIPAddress rely on, and it updates continuously. If Google’s internal table suddenly says “parts of 2600:387::/32 == Japan”, every Google property will start localising to Japan as soon as you’re assigned one of those addresses.
[…] In parts of AZ / NM AT&T recently began handing out addresses from a newer pool such as
2600:387:c:6d15::/64. That pool looks fine in ARIN, but Google’s crawler apparently imported stale data (the block used to belong to SoftBank years ago when it was still teamed with Sprint in the U.S.–Japan joint venture). Once that stale record slipped in, anything behind those addresses was treated as located in Japan.
See the complete ChatGPT answer for more detailed discussion of the problem and of possible workarounds: https://chatgpt.com/share/68073b5c-26c0-800f-a88a-9412fc9a2db6
If ChatGPT’s analysis is correct, then the best fix would be for Google to update its IP-geolocation mapping. Hello, Google! 👋