Internationalization: is each locale reaching its market?

The Internationalization report checks whether the language and country versions of your site reach the people they were built for. It reads Search Console's page-by-country data, detects the locale of every URL, and shows for each market how much of its own country's demand it captures and how much of that country's traffic lands on a version meant for someone else, the usual sign of missing or broken hreflang.

Run it

• Analysis Type: Folder-Based for locales within this property (folders such as /de/ or /en-gb/, or subdomains such as fr.example.com); Domain & Property Based to compare your connected properties, such as example.de and example.nl.
• Analysis Period: the last 7, 14 or 31 days (31 by default), ending on the latest day with data.
• Folder Interpretation: Countries or Languages. Some codes are both: /ar/ could be Argentina or Arabic, /id/ Indonesia or Indonesian. This setting decides how such ambiguous codes are read; unambiguous ones such as /en-gb/ or /fr/ are always read correctly.

Press Start Analysis. Filters at the top apply to the data.

How locales are detected

AutoPSEO looks at the first folder of each URL, and at the first label of the host when it is a two-letter code:

• A code with a region, like fr-ca or en_GB, is a country market (Canada, United Kingdom).
• A language code, like de or ja, is a language market whose targets are the countries where that language is a main language of the web: German covers Germany, Austria and Switzerland; Spanish covers Spain and much of Latin America.
• Pages without a locale marker form the Default market.

Common non-locale names such as www, api, cdn or blog are ignored. Google's own advice on localized versions uses the same building blocks: ISO 639-1 language codes with optional ISO 3166-1 region codes.

Country Targeting

The cards count Locale markets, Localized pages, Localized impressions (share of all impressions), Average coverage and Mismatched countries. For every market the table shows pages, clicks, impressions, CTR and position, plus two measures:

• Coverage: impressions the market got from its target countries, divided by all impressions those countries produced on your site. 70% means the German folder captured 70% of your search visibility in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; the rest went to other versions.
• On-target share: the share of the market's own impressions that came from its target countries.

The Market × country heatmap shows, for your 12 largest markets and countries, the share of each country's impressions that landed on each market. A second table sums the markets by language.

Cannibalization between locales

The Cannibalization tab looks from the country's side. For each of your top 40 countries it shows the Expected market (your locale for that country), the share of its impressions On target, Misrouted to another locale and on Generic pages without a locale, and the Biggest wrong market. Severity follows the misrouted share: High from 50%, Medium from 25%, Low above 5%, OK otherwise. Mismatched countries on the first tab counts the Medium and High ones.

Misrouting usually comes from:

• hreflang annotations that are missing, point to the wrong URL, or are not returned by the other version. Google ignores the pair when two pages do not both point to each other.
• a missing x-default, so Google has no fallback version for searchers whose language or country you do not target;
• versions in the same language with the same main content (say /en-us/ and /en-gb/), which Google may treat as duplicates and fold into one canonical.

Cross-Property Comparison

With Domain & Property Based, AutoPSEO loads country data for every property you have connected and shows where each one's impressions come from. ccTLD target is the country a domain like .de implies; Aligned says whether its biggest audience is that country (generic TLDs like .com have none). A .fr property whose biggest audience is Belgium is not necessarily wrong, but a .de property whose biggest audience is the United States deserves a look. Google lists the trade-offs between ccTLDs, subdomains and folders in managing multi-regional sites.

How AutoPSEO helps

The content engine writes each article in every language your site uses and delivers the translations together with the original, so each language version can name the others; articles AutoPSEO hosts are served under a language prefix with hreflang alternates. New pages therefore arrive with their locales complete. See translation. For hreflang basics, read the hreflang FAQ.