Cloudflare Tunes WARP’s Location Logic and Expands Its Network
When you open an app or run a search, the results you get often depend on where the Internet thinks you are. That assumed location is typically derived from your IP address — and for VPN users, it can be wildly off. Berliners routed through Amsterdam might get results in Dutch; a UK user could lose access to BBC iPlayer. Cloudflare calls getting this right enough to show you nearby pizza places the “pizza test.” It is the balance between useful results and not giving away your precise location.
This week, the company announced two updates to its 1.1.1.1 + WARP apps. The first changes how the service handles geolocation for browsing, aiming to keep search and streaming content relevant without exposing your IP address. The second expands the number of cities available to WARP+ subscribers for faster connections.
Keeping search results local without leaking your IP
WARP was designed to route traffic through the Cloudflare data center closest to the user, which normally keeps latency low. But that doesn’t always hold in practice. ISPs may not peer with Cloudflare at every location, or they may steer traffic toward less congested routes. When that happens, a user can exit the Cloudflare network through a data center that has nothing to do with where they actually live.
For services that infer location from the IP address they see — search engines, video platforms, content licensing systems — that mismatch is a problem. A person in Berlin can end up seeing Dutch results or localized content meant for another market.
The update changes how WARP handles that exit point. Instead of always leaving from the nearest data center, traffic now egresses through Cloudflare IPs that carry accurate, city-level geolocation information. Web servers will see those Cloudflare IPs, not the user’s real address, so there’s no direct way to track the individual. At the same time, the location those third parties infer will look like the right metro area.
To build that mapping, Cloudflare analyzed a subset of network traffic to estimate how many WARP users it had per city, then distributed those users across egress IPs in an anycast architecture to limit the number of new addresses it had to allocate. The company then submitted the new IPs to third-party geolocation databases so their location data is correct.
Privacy protections remain unchanged: the app does not request location permissions and does not log customer IP addresses.
Notably, this is not the traditional VPN trick of deliberately dropping you in another country to dodge geographic content restrictions. WARP still routes through a nearby point of presence — but now it makes sure that “nearby” is determined by your actual locale, not by routing quirks.
More cities for WARP+ subscribers
Cloudflare also announced that its network now spans over 275 cities in more than 100 countries. With that expansion, the company has added roughly 20 new cities to the list of locations WARP+ users can connect to. The larger selection means shorter paths between the user’s device and a Cloudflare data center.
That distance matters for throughput. Lower latency increases the effective download speed due to the bandwidth-delay product — the relationship between round-trip time and the amount of data that can be in flight. In practical terms, websites should load faster whether they are hosted on the Cloudflare network or not. Subscribers pay nothing extra; the pricing model is unchanged.
Cloudflare expects to revisit these connection points as the network continues to grow, so the pool of WARP and WARP+ cities will likely keep expanding.
