What this page shows about your location
When you tap Find me, your browser asks your phone or computer for its position. If you allow it, the page turns that position into the things people usually want to know: the street address you are nearest to, the city or town, the county, the state, the ZIP code, your latitude and longitude, and the height of the ground above sea level.
All of it appears on one screen. You do not have to visit a separate page for your ZIP code, another for your county and a third for your elevation. Each line has a copy button, and the share button makes a link to the exact point.
If you would rather not share your position, type an address, a ZIP code or a pair of coordinates into the box instead. The page looks that place up the same way.
How your device works out where you are
A phone uses several sources at once and reports the best answer it has. Outdoors, satellite positioning (GPS and the other satellite systems such as Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou) usually gets within a few metres. The US government puts typical smartphone accuracy at about 4.9 metres (16 feet) under open sky.
Indoors, satellites are often blocked, so the device falls back on nearby Wi-Fi networks and mobile phone towers whose positions are already known. That is still usually good to within a street or two in a city, and much looser in the countryside.
A desktop or laptop without GPS relies on Wi-Fi alone, and on some networks only on the internet address, which can put you in the wrong town. The accuracy line under the signs tells you how far off the reading might be, so you know how much to trust it.
If the accuracy line says hundreds of metres or more, your device is guessing from the network. Step outside or turn on precise location and tap Find me again.
Why a website needs your permission first
Browsers never hand a website your location silently. The first time you tap Find me, you will see a prompt asking whether to allow it. On an iPhone the Safari prompt appears at the top of the page; on Android Chrome it appears at the bottom.
If you tapped Block by mistake, the page cannot ask again by itself. You have to change the setting in the browser, which is covered step by step in our guide to turning on location access.
This site does not store your position or send it to our own server, because there is no server of ours involved. The lookup goes from your browser to OpenStreetMap for the address and to a public elevation dataset for the height, and the result stays on your screen.
Sharing your location with someone
The Copy share link button creates a web address that ends with your coordinates. Anyone who opens it sees the same signs and map for that point. It is a snapshot, not live tracking: if you move, the link still shows where you were when you copied it.
That makes it useful for telling a friend which trailhead you parked at, giving a delivery driver an exact spot in a large car park, or sending a roadside assistance service a precise position. Treat it like your home address and only send it to people you trust.
The Google Maps and Apple Maps buttons open the same point in those apps if you want turn-by-turn directions back to it.
When "my location" is not where you are
The most common reasons are an indoor reading taken from Wi-Fi, a VPN that makes the network look like it is somewhere else, and precise location being switched off for the browser. On a phone, the fix is almost always to turn on precise location and step outside for a moment.
The address can also be slightly off even when the pin is right. Reverse geocoding picks the nearest mapped address to the pin, so in a large building, a park or a rural road it may name a house number next door or a road a short walk away. The coordinates are the most exact part of the answer.
Our guide to why your location is wrong goes through each cause and what to do about it.