<b>The country-targeting setting you can no longer rely on</b>

<b>The country-targeting setting you can no longer rely on</b>

A piece of institutional memory worth correcting: the International Targeting report's country-setting in Search Console was deprecated. The old workflow — "set this subfolder to target Germany in GSC" — no longer exists as a control.

What this changes in practice:

— Geotargeting now flows from three sources Google still reads: ccTLD signals (hard), hreflang annotations (the language/region handshake), and on-page/behavioral signals (currency, address, local links, server location as a weak hint).

— For a generic TLD on subfolders, you have no explicit "this folder = this country" lever anymore. Hreflang carries that weight. This raises the stakes on getting region codes right, because there's no longer a manual override to compensate.

— The hreflang error reporting that lived in that report has partly migrated; you now lean more on the URL Inspection tool and third-party validators to confirm cluster health.

The deeper point: Google's stated direction is that explicit country-targeting was a crutch, and they'd rather infer market relevance from content and links. Whether that's better for you depends on whether your signals are clear. A US-priced page on a /uk/ subfolder with no other UK signal is now harder to correct manually.

Unknown: how much residual weight legacy GSC settings still carry for sites that set them years ago. Officially zero; we can't verify the implementation.