Google has a POP (point-of-presence) at most ISPs, even small ones. There was a whole time, when pinging google.com would return xxx.static.my-isp.tld as rDNS.

Google has a POP (point-of-presence) at most ISPs, even small ones. There was a whole time, when pinging google.com would return xxx.static.my-isp.tld as rDNS. # dig @2001:4860:4860::8888 +short A google.com. | head -n1 85.234.204.236 # dig @8.8.8.8 +short A google.com. | head -n1 74.125.136.102 The first IP, if you whois it, belongs to my ISP, the 2nd IP belongs to Google. These POP servers are one to several Dell servers located in your ISPs network, who then redirect traffic to other Google servers. These servers usually also have some caching (ie popular YouTube videos are cached there).