Geotargeting in Google Search Console

Google Search Console previously included an International Targeting report that let you associate a subdomain or subdirectory property with a specific country. That feature was deprecated in September 2022 and is no longer available.

What did Google remove and why?

By September 2022, Google had withdrawn access to the International Targeting report from Search Console. In the official deprecation notice, Google stated that the ability to target search results to specific countries using Search Console country targeting “was determined to have little value for the ecosystem, and is no longer supported.”¹

The report was announced for removal on 24 August 2022 and taken down on 22 September 2022.² It covered two functions:

• Country targeting: a site-wide setting that associated a property with a specific country. It applied to properties on generic top-level domains such as .com or .org. It was never available on ccTLD properties, which Google already associates with their country: as the pre-removal documentation put it, “if you use a country-coded domain, you won’t be able to specify a geographic location”.³
• Hreflang error monitoring: a Language section reporting two specific error types, “no return tags” (an hreflang annotation with no matching tag on the target page) and “unknown language code”.³ Errors were broken out by implementation method (page-level tags, sitemaps, HTTP headers).

Both are gone, and nothing in Search Console replaced either function.

Worth noting that Google is not alone here. Bing removed its own geo-targeting setting from Bing Webmaster Tools two years earlier, in September 2020, with Fabrice Canel confirming it and pointing site owners at markup instead: “Yes, we did remove that. Meta data in HTML or HTTP Header is a best way adopted by most Search Engines.”⁴ Both major engines have now dropped tool-based geotargeting in favour of on-page and markup signals.

What geotargeting signals remain?

Although the Search Console setting no longer exists, Google still uses geo-signals when determining which version of content to serve to users in a given country. These have always been the stronger signals, and nothing about how Google processes them has changed.

Google documents four groups of signals for determining a page’s target locale:⁵

ccTLDs: country-code top-level domains (.co.uk, .de, .fr) “provide a strong signal to both users and search engines that your site is explicitly intended for a certain country”. This requires no configuration and was unaffected by the deprecation. One caveat: Google treats around twenty vanity ccTLDs as generic, including .ai, .co, .io, .me and .tv, plus .eu and .asia, so those carry no automatic country association.

Hreflang: “whether in tags, headers, or sitemaps”. This tells Google which language and regional version should be served to which audience. It operates per page and maps equivalent versions across markets. Note what it does not do: hreflang does not tell Google what language a page is in. “Google doesn’t use hreflang or the HTML lang attribute to detect the language of a page; instead, we use algorithms to determine the language”,⁶ working from the visible content.⁵

Server location, through the server’s IP address. Google notes this “is often physically near your users and can be a signal about your site’s intended audience”, but qualifies it: sites using CDNs or hosting abroad mean “it is not a definitive signal”.

Other signals: “local addresses and phone numbers on the pages, the use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, or signals from your Business Profile (where available)”. This group is easy to overlook and cheap to get right. Publishing a local address, a local phone number and local pricing does real work here.

URL structure sits underneath these rather than beside them: subdirectories (example.com/de/) and subdomains (de.example.com) organise the site so the signals above can attach cleanly to each market.

One documented negative worth knowing, since it rules out a tempting shortcut: Google “ignores locational meta tags (like geo.position or distribution) or geotargeting HTML attributes”.⁵ There is no markup that replaces the removed setting.

How do you monitor hreflang errors without the report?

Start with the answer most guidance gets wrong: not in Search Console, at all. The Language section of the removed report was the hreflang monitor, and Google did not replace it. Its Page Indexing documentation states that “alternate language pages are not detected by Search Console”,⁷ and its URL Inspection documentation does not mention hreflang anywhere.⁸ Advice pointing you at the Pages report or URL Inspection for hreflang errors is out of date, however often it is repeated.

Google’s own documentation now routes this to third parties. Its hreflang page has a “Debugging hreflang errors” section stating that “there are many third-party tools available that you can use to debug hreflang annotations”, with the caveat that “these tools are not maintained or checked by Google”.⁶ The two it names are Aleyda Solis’s hreflang tags generator and the Merkle hreflang tags testing tool.

Third-party crawlers: Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, and Ahrefs Site Audit include dedicated hreflang audits. These fill the gap left by the removed report and are arguably better than it was, since they crawl the full hreflang graph rather than reporting only what Google had already discovered.

Manual inspection: checking <head> output and XML sitemaps directly, particularly after template changes that affect page-level markup.

Search Console, for symptoms only: you cannot see hreflang errors, but you can see their effects. Pages missing from the index, or regional variants consolidated onto one canonical, are both consistent with hreflang problems. Note that where Google consolidates near-identical variants, performance data reports against the canonical, so flat per-market numbers may reflect consolidation rather than a fault in your annotations.

How do you monitor international performance by country?

The Performance report in Search Console still allows country-level filtering, and this was not affected by the deprecation.

1. Open the Performance report.
2. Click + New and select Country.
3. Add target countries as separate filters to compare markets.

Sudden drops in visibility for a specific country can indicate a hreflang error affecting that region, a server-side issue, or a ranking shift. Exporting and tracking this data over time gives a clearer view than spot-checking the UI.

What to do if you previously relied on the country targeting setting

If you had country targeting configured in Search Console before the deprecation, that setting no longer exists or has any effect. Google’s guidance is to rely on hreflang, URL structure, content language, and ccTLDs as the signals that communicate geo-intent.

For sites using generic TLDs (.com, .co, .io) across multiple markets, the practical change is to ensure hreflang is correctly implemented and that each market version has a consistent URL structure. The country targeting setting was at best a supporting hint alongside these signals. Google’s decision to remove it reflects the view that it was not contributing meaningfully.

Frequently asked questions

Does removing the country targeting setting affect existing rankings?
Google’s stated reason for removing it was that it “was determined to have little value for the ecosystem”,¹ which is a judgement about the tool rather than a promise about ranking effects. In practice, removal should not cause ranking changes for sites with otherwise correct international setups, since the setting was one weak signal among several. If you see unexpected country-level shifts, a hreflang or crawling issue is a more likely cause than the deprecation.

Is there any way to set country targeting in Search Console now?
No. The setting was removed and has not been replaced. The alternatives are the geo-signals described above: ccTLDs, hreflang, URL structure, and content language.

How do I check for hreflang errors now?
Use a third-party crawler with hreflang audit support. Screaming Frog and Sitebulb both map hreflang relationships across a site and flag common errors such as missing return tags and broken alternate URLs.

Footnotes

1. The International Targeting report is deprecated — Google Search Console Help ↩ ↩²

2. Google Search Console to remove International Targeting report — Search Engine Land ↩

3. International Targeting report (archived June 2022) — Google Search Console Help via the Internet Archive ↩ ↩²

4. Bing Webmaster Tools drops geo-targeting feature — Search Engine Roundtable ↩

5. Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites — Google Search Central ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Tell Google about localized versions of your page — Google Search Central ↩ ↩²

7. Page Indexing report — Google Search Console Help ↩

8. URL Inspection Tool — Google Search Console Help ↩