international targeting
Also called: international targeting report, country targeting gsc, geotargeting in search console
International targeting tells search engines which country or language a page is meant for, using signals like ccTLDs, hreflang annotations, and URL structure. Google Search Console's old International Targeting report (which let you set a target country) is deprecated, so these on-page signals now do the work.
For years, site owners set a target country inside Google Search Console’s International Targeting report. Google announced the report’s deprecation on August 24, 2022, and removed it from Search Console on September 22, 2022, saying manual country targeting “was determined to have little value for the ecosystem, and is no longer supported.” The report also surfaced site-wide hreflang errors, and that view went away with it.
Where the signals live now
With the panel gone, Google reads geographic intent from what is actually on your site. The strongest signals are:
- URL structure: a country-code TLD like
example.de, a subdomain likede.example.com, or a subdirectory likeexample.com/de/. hreflangannotations in the page<head>, HTTP headers, or your XML sitemap, using an ISO 639-1 language code plus an optional ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 region code (for exampleen-gbores-mx).- Server location, local addresses, currency, language, and links from regional sites.
Google warns against using IP analysis to swap content, because IP location is “difficult and generally not reliable,” and its crawler does not vary source location to catch geo variants. A ccTLD sends a strong country signal on its own. A generic domain leans almost entirely on hreflang to route the right page to the right market.
How it affects your traffic
For a store selling into several countries, weak or missing international targeting means Google can serve the wrong regional page (or the wrong currency) to a shopper, or treat your language variants as near-duplicates and split their ranking. Since the Search Console country toggle is gone, correct hreflang pairs and a clean URL structure are the main levers left for steering each market to its right page. Our e-commerce SEO work audits hreflang, currency and language signals, and store architecture so the right product page ranks in the right country instead of cannibalizing itself.
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