Location data and sources

Geography you can download

The geographic file index lists the available tiles. Use a family name and tile name in /geo/family/tile.json. Each file includes its original source and licence. The files contain public geography, never visitor locations.

US place names and representative points come from the 2025 Census Gazetteer. The national park file contains the park names, official links and NPS representative points used for distance calculations.

Boundaries and place names

Census state and county geometry uses 2025 boundaries; ZIP Code Tabulation Areas use 2020 geography. City and town geometry uses ACS 2025, January 1, 2025 vintage. A Gazetteer point is a point inside a named place, not its center, postal address or entrance. The boundary collector requests a maximum offset of 0.0005 degrees, about 55 meters by our spherical conversion. The nearest ZIP outline fallback uses that same distance limit; it is not a guarantee of boundary accuracy.

The Census files are US federal works, generally public domain in the United States. The Census ZCTA guidance explains why a statistical ZIP area must not stand in for an official delivery ZIP.

Time-zone geometry and clock rules

Time-zone boundaries use timezone-boundary-builder release 2026c, including ocean zones. Geometry is simplified and clipped into geographic tiles. This is a modified database derived from OpenStreetMap, licensed under ODbL 1.0, with credit to OpenStreetMap contributors.

The derivative is available in the geographic file index under timezones; for example, the tile containing Austin. Original release and processing details are in the time-zone manifest. Local time, zone names and UTC offsets come from the browser’s installed time-zone rules. Its IANA release is not exposed here, so recent clock-rule changes may require an updated browser.

Elevation lookup in this tab

Open this USGS response

Elevation and park distances

USGS elevation is requested only when you choose it. It is an interpolated ground height, not a surveyed control height. We show whole feet and meters for magnitudes of one or more; smaller nonzero values retain one significant digit and their sign. Terrain cell sizes use three significant digits, so floating-point artifacts do not become apparent source precision. The conversion uses one foot = 0.3048 meters. Missing or invalid heights are unavailable, never zero. A current query does not make the underlying terrain survey new.

Park distances use the haversine calculation on a sphere with radius 6,371,008.8 meters, then divide by 1,609.344 for miles or 1,000 for kilometers. They measure to NPS representative points, not entrances or boundaries. The supplied list contains 63 national parks; Kings Canyon and Sequoia share a source point.

Street-address and postal delivery lookups are not connected. Public Nominatim is not used. IP estimates run only through the separate opt-in page described below.

Named US beaches

The downloadable beach file contains 2,349 named features and 2,444 supplied map reference points. It comes from the public-domain USGS Geographic Names Information System service, retrieved 2026-09-19. That date is not the revision date of every name. This is not a live access or conditions feed.

Only features in the non-historical Landforms layer with the class Beach qualify. The official feature-class definition distinguishes a beach landform from a resort, populated place or other feature. The file covers named features in US states and territories; unnamed and unrecorded beaches are absent. Coast, lake or river type, access, surface and entry points are not supplied.

Repeated GNIS identifiers are merged while preserving every supplied reference point. A feature is ranked by the shortest haversine distance to one of its recorded points, using the same arithmetic as parks. The chosen point is also the map and directions destination. It is not an entrance or a nearest shoreline edge. Alternatives omit repeated names for easier comparison. The download keeps feature identities, state and county labels, points, source query URLs and hashes.

The whole file is served locally; visitor coordinates never reach the source service. Missing access remains “not recorded” and is not permission to enter. No result means no feature in these records, not that no beach exists.

IP-location estimates

Country API permits commercial use and states that requests are not logged. That is the provider’s published policy, not an inspection of its servers. Its sources are MaxMind GeoLite2 and Cloudflare; neither establishes physical presence. Checked 2026-09-19.

The page requests only country, city and subdivision, after an explicit click. It sends no GPS point, cookies or referrer and uses no browser response cache. Null fields stay unavailable. The response schema documents these fields. No provider request occurs on the homepage or after GPS denial.

Original sources

Question about a result?

Start with how the lookup works. Corrections are not open yet. When they are, the contact page will say what to include.