Geo-Targeting | ScrapeRouter

Geo-targeting means sending requests from a specific country, region, or city so a website returns the version of the page that real users in that location would see. In scraping, this matters because prices, availability, search results, and even entire pages often change by geography, and if you ignore that, your data is wrong before you even start cleaning it.

Examples

A few common cases where geo-targeting matters:

Ecommerce pricing: the same product shows different prices in the US, UK, and Germany
Travel sites: hotel rates and availability change by country and sometimes by city
SERP scraping: search results are localized, so ranking data from one country is useless for another
Streaming or news sites: some pages are blocked or rewritten based on location

Example request with country-level targeting:

curl -X POST "https://www.scraperouter.com/api/v1/scrape/" \
  -H "Authorization: Api-Key $api_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://www.example.com/product/123",
    "country": "us"
  }'

If you scrape the same URL from different locations, you may get different HTML, prices, currency symbols, stock messages, or no page at all.

Practical tips

Do not assume one country is enough: many teams test from their own location, then find out later the production data is biased
Store the geography with the result: country, and if relevant region or city, so you can debug weird differences later
Expect site behavior to change with location: different templates, languages, bot checks, consent flows, and pagination patterns
Use geo-targeting only when the site actually localizes content: otherwise you're just adding cost and more moving parts
Retry in the same geography first: if a page fails in Germany, retrying from Brazil may succeed, but it is no longer the same dataset
Watch for false consistency: sometimes a site returns a default global page instead of the real local one, which looks valid until you compare outputs

A simple pattern is to make geography explicit in your job config:

{
  "url": "https://www.example.com/search?q=running+shoes",
  "country": "uk",
  "dataset": "uk-search-results"
}

Use cases

Localized price monitoring: track what users in each market actually see instead of relying on one generic page
Search engine scraping: collect rankings for the exact country you care about
Ad verification: check whether ads, landing pages, or offers are shown only in certain regions
Marketplace intelligence: compare assortment and availability across countries
Compliance and access checks: confirm whether content is blocked, redirected, or modified in specific places

In practice, geo-targeting is one of those things that seems optional until you care about data quality. If the site localizes content and you scrape from the wrong place, the scrape can be technically successful and still useless.