The first tab of the Geography card. Countries are shaded by traffic — darker means more.
The world map tab of the Geography card, populated with a realistic spread of traffic across several continents and a hover tooltip visible on one country showing its name and visitor count. Light theme, desktop.
The same world map in dark theme, to check the country fill scale reads correctly against the dark background. Dark theme, desktop.
Reading it
Hover a country for its name and visitor count.
Click a country to filter the whole dashboard to it — same as clicking its row in the Countries tab.
Grey means no traffic in the selected range, not "not measured".
The map fetches up to 250 countries, not the top 20 that the list tabs show. That is deliberate: a country left out of the data would render grey and read as "nobody visited from there", so the map gets everything it can colour.
Where the location comes from
From the visitor's IP address at the moment their request arrives. We resolve it to a country, a region and a city, store those three, and discard the address. The IP itself is never stored — not in the events table, not in a log line, not in an error.
Accuracy, honestly
IP geolocation is good at countries and vague below that.
Country is usually right.
Region is often right and sometimes wrong, especially on mobile networks where the connection exits somewhere other than where the person is.
City is approximate. Treat it as a hint, not a fact.
Three things that make it wrong in ways worth knowing about:
VPNs report the exit node. A visitor in Berlin on a VPN terminating in Amsterdam is Dutch traffic here, and nothing can distinguish that from a real Dutch visitor.
Corporate networks report the gateway. A whole office can appear in the city where their traffic egresses.
Crawler traffic is not people. With the bot filter off, the map includes crawler requests, which cluster around data centres and can dominate a small site's map. The default is filter-on, which is what you want here.
If every visitor appears in one city, that is not a geolocation problem — that is a proxy that is not forwarding the visitor's IP. Read the top of Serving the script from your own domain.
Regions and cities
The other two tabs of the same card, each ranked by visitors, showing the top 20. The Regions and Cities lists include the country alongside the name, so Cambridge in England and Cambridge in Massachusetts are distinguishable.
What is not here
No visitor pins. There is no map of individual people and where they are right now. That needs per-person identity TrueStat does not have, and it is one of the more privacy-hostile things an analytics product can show. See What we deliberately cannot do.