The International Targeting report is gone. Here's what to check instead

The International Targeting report is gone. Here's what to check instead

For years, teams used the Search Console geo-targeting settings to force a country association on a domain or subdirectory. That report has been retired, and many people still believe the old setting is doing something. It is not.

What still matters for country signals today:

— Country-code top-level domains carry their own strong association and cannot be overridden
— Hreflang with region codes is now the primary explicit signal for generic domains
— Server location, local backlinks and local business markup contribute weak secondary signals
— Currency, address and phone format on the page help disambiguate

The silent mistake: a company with a .com domain used to rely on the manual country target for its /uk/ folder. The setting disappeared, the folder now competes globally, and rankings in the intended market decay slowly enough that nobody connects the dots.

Audit path: check whether your regional folders have en-GB, en-AU style codes rather than a bare en. If they only have language codes, you have no regional signal at all anymore.