Upstate is everything north and west of Rockland and Westchester counties.
LOL, it’s anything north of the GW Bridge.
No, there’s big region north of Rockland and Westchester County that is deemed (by folks living there) to be “Central New York - including Syracuse, Utica and Albany. So they’d tell you to go north of that to be in “Upstate” NY.
That seems reasonable, just like Manhattan gets divided into three nearly equal geographic regions - Downtown, Midtown and Uptown - so the same should go when dividing up regions in the state.