Geo-Specific Optimization Strategies

An answer engine asked “the best accountancy software” gives a different shortlist to someone it believes is in Manchester than to someone it believes is in Melbourne — different vendors, different regulations, different names it has seen recommended. If you sell into more than one market and measure only one, you are measuring the market you happen to be sitting in.

This tutorial sets up market-aware scanning, explains precisely what a region does and does not change, and covers the one bookkeeping rule that keeps multi-market data from corrupting your headline trend.

Step 1: Set the project’s default market

Go to Settings → General. Under the brand and domain fields there is a Target region (optional) input. Fill it in and every scan for the project is run for that market by default. Leave it blank and the chat engines get no market instruction at all — but blank is not neutral everywhere, because Google AI Overviews has to be searched from somewhere. Step 2 explains why that one engine behaves differently and what a blank field means for it.

It is free text, so write it the way you would describe the market to a person: “United Kingdom”, “Germany”, “Canada”, “Singapore”. Prefer a country or a well-known market name over an abbreviation or a marketing region — “EMEA” is not somewhere an engine can answer for.

Choose the market where the answer actually matters commercially. This is your default, and it is the market your trend chart, benchmark table and alerts will all be about.

Step 2: Understand what a region actually changes

A region is not a proxy setting and not a VPN — nothing about the scan pretends to originate from the market. It changes two things inside the scan, both of them explicit:

1. The chat engines are instructed to answer for that market. The scan tells each chat engine to answer as if advising someone located there and to prefer options and providers relevant to that market.
2. Auto-generated discovery prompts are biased toward it. When a project has no tracked prompts of its own, the generated questions are framed for the configured market rather than generically.

Google AI Overviews is the exception, and it inverts the first point. Six of the seven engines are chat models, and a chat model can only be asked to answer for a market. Google AI Overviews is not one: its answer is the AI Overview block a real Google search renders, so there is no system instruction to give it. The region is passed to Google as an actual search location instead — which makes this the one place in the product where a region really is a location setting, rather than an instruction about one.

Two things follow, and the second is the one that catches people out:

• On this engine the region is stronger, not weaker. Google localises the search for real. You are reading what that market’s searchers are shown, not what a model produces when asked to imagine them.
• Blank does not mean neutral here. A Google search has to run from somewhere, so a blank region falls back to a default market rather than to no market — the United States, on the search provider the product ships with. Comparing a blank-region project against a “United Kingdom” one is therefore comparing US results to UK results on this engine, not “no market” to UK. If the US is not your home market, set the field even if you only ever intend to scan one.

The second point of the numbered list has a consequence worth planning around. If you use your own tracked prompts, they are used verbatim in every market — which is what makes cross-market comparison valid, because the question is held constant and only the market instruction varies. That is usually what you want. When a market genuinely asks a different question, that belongs in a separate project, not in a region toggle.

What a region does not do: it does not change which engines exist in a market, it does not translate your prompts, and it does not add coverage of engines that are not tracked here. Every engine you track is scanned in every market you configure — Meta AI and Google AI Overviews included, on the same coverage terms as your default market.

Step 3: Add the extra markets you want to compare

Additional markets live on the Competitors page, in the Multi-Region Comparison card. Type a market — “United Kingdom” — and click Add. The card lists your default market first, marked as such, then every extra market you have configured.

A market has to be configured on the project before it can be scanned. A scan request naming an unknown market is rejected rather than silently run against the default, so the set of markets you have data for is always the set you deliberately created.

Add markets sparingly. Each one is a full scan of your prompt set, so the cost is the same as adding another brand to benchmark.

Step 4: Run a scan per market and read the comparison

Each row in the card has a Scan button. Click it and that market’s scan runs the same prompts with the market applied — as an instruction to the chat engines, and as a search location on Google AI Overviews, per Step 2 — then returns a score, a mention rate and a share-of-voice figure for it. Rows that have never been scanned say so plainly rather than showing a zero.

Read the comparison as a set of separate measurements, not as a league table:

• A market far below your default is the finding to act on. Something is being recommended there and it is not you.
• A market at parity usually means the engines are answering from the same global material in both, which is common in categories with no local incumbents.
• A market above your default happens, and it is worth understanding rather than celebrating — it often means a local listing or publication carries you well and your home market has no equivalent.

The card also shows how recently each market was scanned. Markets scanned weeks apart are not comparable to each other; re-scan the set together before presenting it.

Step 5: Keep market scans out of your home-market trend

This is the bookkeeping rule, and it is handled for you — but knowing it prevents a fair amount of confusion.

Every scan is tagged with the market it measured. Your default market is the untagged one. Trends, competitor benchmarks and the headline score all read default-market rows only. A scan you ran for Germany does not appear as a point on your home-market trend line, and does not compete for a slot in the benchmark table.

Without that separation, running a scan for a weaker market would show up as a visibility drop you never experienced, on a chart you show to other people. The multi-region card is the one place where foreign-market rows are read, and it is the right place for them.

The practical implication: if your trend chart looks sparse after you started multi-market scanning, that is the separation working. Your home-market history is unchanged.

Step 6: Act on a market gap

A market where you are absent is a content and corroboration problem in that market, and the fixes are largely the ones classic international SEO already asks for:

• Publish something that exists for that market. A pricing page in the local currency, a page addressing local regulation, a case study with a local customer. Engines cannot recommend a local fit that is not stated anywhere.
• Declare language and region properly. Google’s guidance on localized versions of your pages covers hreflang and the alternatives; the W3C’s note on language declarations in HTML covers getting the lang attribute right. Both matter more than usual here, because a machine deciding whether a page is for a market has little else to go on.
• Get into local sources. The Citations page has a market selector above the panels: switch it to the market you want and the citation tables show that market’s scan — the third-party domains an engine cited when answering for Germany, say, rather than your home market’s. The Multi-Region card remains the per-market score comparison; the selector is where the detail lives.
• Do not translate and stop. A translated page with no local evidence, no local pricing and no local corroboration reads as a global page in another language, which is roughly how it will be treated.

Then re-scan that market on the same prompts and check whether its row moved. Markets move independently — improvement in one implies nothing about the others.

Step 7: Where to go next

• Competitor benchmarking — the feature page for the view that hosts multi-region comparison.
• Geographic variation guide — why answers differ by market in the first place.
• Multilingual AEO mechanics — language as distinct from market.
• AEO for international brands — running this at scale across many markets.
• Setting Up Tracked Prompts — holding the question constant is what makes a market comparison mean anything.