What happened to the International Targeting report?

Google deprecated it. The report had two jobs, flagging hreflang errors and letting you pick one target country for a generic domain such as .com, and both are gone. Google's notice says that country targeting through Search Console was found to have "little value for the ecosystem" and is no longer supported, while hreflang is still supported and used (Google's deprecation notice). Targeting now comes from how you build and structure the site.

How Google decides which country a page is for

Google's guide to multi-regional and multilingual sites names the signals it uses:

• Country-code domains such as example.de, a strong signal to users and search engines alike.
• Hreflang, in tags, HTTP headers or sitemaps.
• Server location, though not a definitive signal, because content delivery networks serve from everywhere.
• The page itself: local addresses and phone numbers, the language and currency, links from other local sites, and signals from a Business Profile.

It ignores location meta tags such as geo.position, and it doesn't use the lang attribute or the URL to decide what language a page is in; it reads the visible text.

Choosing a URL structure

Whatever you choose, link the versions to each other so people (and Googlebot) can switch, rather than redirecting visitors automatically by IP address or browser language.

Checking whether targeting works without the report

1. In the Performance report, filter Page to one market's folder or subdomain and open the Countries tab. Most impressions should come from that market.
2. Then filter by Country and open the Pages tab. If searchers in France mostly see your English pages, the French version isn't being chosen.
3. Compare periods after you change hreflang or URL structure, since the effect takes a while to show.

Hreflang itself is covered in checking hreflang in Search Console.

How AutoPSEO helps

The Internationalization report does those Performance report checks for every market at once. It detects the market of each URL from its folder or subdomain, lets you decide whether an ambiguous code such as /es/ means Spanish or Spain, and shows for each country the share of impressions that reached the intended version, plus a market-by-country heatmap. The Countries report covers the day-to-day view of where your traffic comes from.