International rank tracking: rankings per country and language, and hreflang checks

How search engines decide which market a searcher is in

Google moved to location-based results in 2017: since then, it says, everyone using Search gets the same local experience whether they use google.com or a country domain. In April 2025 it announced it would redirect its country-code domains to google.com, gradually, because the domain no longer decides the market.

That leaves location signals and language preferences as the variables. For a logged-out tracker, location means the exit IP's country, and language means your request headers and the search parameters you send. Set both per market and keep them fixed from run to run, or your series measures your configuration changes.

hreflang verification: what to check

Google documents three equivalent ways to declare localised versions: HTML link elements, HTTP headers or the XML sitemap. Using more than one adds nothing. Whichever you choose, each language version must list itself and all other versions; if two pages do not point to each other, the annotations for that pair may be ignored.

Codes are an ISO 639-1 language, optionally followed by an ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 region; a region alone is invalid. An x-default value is the fallback for users whose language matches no version. Google also says it does not use hreflang or the HTML lang attribute to detect a page's language, so the content itself has to be in the language you declare.

• Self-reference — every page lists itself.
• Return links — every alternate links back.
• Valid codes — de-AT is valid, at alone is not, en-UK is not a valid region.
• Indexable targets — alternates that redirect, 404 or carry noindex break the cluster.
• Results match — the URL that ranks in each market is the one the cluster designates.

Location-adaptive sites and the crawler's view

Some sites serve different content on one URL depending on the visitor's location or language. Google's documentation notes that its crawler's default IP addresses appear to be in the USA, that it also crawls from IPs outside the USA, and that it sends requests without an Accept-Language header. It recommends separate URLs per locale with hreflang annotations.

A multi-country exit set is the practical way to test what your own site does. Fetch each localised URL from three or four countries: each should return its own version, not a redirect to the visitor's locale. Where it redirects, the version for the crawler's location is the one most likely to be found.

Reading the international matrix

The output is a table of keyword by market, each cell holding a position and a ranking URL. Three views make it useful: share of keywords where the designated URL ranks, positions where a different locale's URL ranks instead, and markets where no URL of yours ranks at all.

Cannibalisation between locales is the most common finding, especially between markets that share a language. It points at the hreflang cluster, the content differences between the versions, and internal links between locales. The parent SERP monitoring page covers keeping the daily runs clean; testing proxy location shows how to verify the exit country per run.