What happened to the International Targeting report?

The International Targeting report has been retired, and with it the setting that let you tell Google which single country a generic domain such as .com was aimed at. There is no replacement report. Country and language targeting is now expressed entirely through how you build the site.

The three signals that still work

• URL structure. A country-code top-level domain (example.de) is the strongest signal and applies to the whole site. Subdirectories (example.com/de/) are the usual compromise: one domain, easy to run, clearly separable in reporting. Subdomains (de.example.com) sit in between.
• hreflang annotations. These tell Google that pages are equivalents in other languages or regions, so the right one is swapped into results. See hreflang.
• The content itself. Language, currency, addresses, local phone numbers and links from sites in that market.

Hosting location and the address in your local business listings matter far less than they once did, and neither is configured in Search Console.

How to check whether targeting is working

Search Console still has the data, just not a dedicated report for it:

1. Open Performance, add the Country dimension and read the distribution.
2. Filter Page to one locale folder, such as /de/, then look at the countries it earns clicks from. A German folder taking most of its clicks from outside German-speaking markets is a targeting problem.
3. Reverse it: filter to one country and look at which pages rank. If the English page ranks in France while the French page sits idle, hreflang or internal linking is at fault.

Tip: create a separate URL-prefix property for each locale folder, alongside the domain property. Each one gets its own 16 months of history, its own sitemaps and its own indexing report, which makes per-market reporting far easier than filtering one large property every time.

Property types are covered in domain property vs URL prefix.

How AutoPSEO helps

The Internationalization report runs in Folder mode for locales inside one property and Domain mode for comparing several country properties, with tabs for country targeting, cannibalization between locales, and cross-property comparison. The Countries report covers the simpler day-to-day view.