How Google Crawls Locale-Adaptive Pages

What Are Locale-Adaptive Pages? #

These are pages that serve different content based on the visitor’s location or language preferences—for example, showing prices in local currency or content tailored for a specific country or language.

How Google Crawls Them #

• Googlebot’s IP addresses are mostly US-based, but also crawl from other countries (geo-distributed crawling).
  
• Googlebot sends HTTP requests without the Accept-Language header, so it doesn’t explicitly communicate preferred language when crawling.
  
• Because of this, Google might not crawl, index, or rank all locale variations of your content if it relies only on detecting location or language from IP or browser settings.
  

Key Recommendations #

• Use separate URLs for each locale version of your content (e.g., example.com/us/, example.com/uk/).
  
• Annotate these URLs with rel=”alternate” hreflang tags to help Google understand language and regional variations clearly.
  
• Do not rely on IP detection or cookies alone to serve different content, as Googlebot may only crawl the US version or a limited set of variations.
  

Geo-Distributed Crawling Notes #

• Googlebot does crawl from IPs outside the USA occasionally.
  
• Treat Googlebot like any other user from the detected country based on the IP address it uses.
  
  • For example, if you block US users from a certain page, you should also block Googlebot if it appears from a US IP.
    
  • Conversely, if Googlebot appears from an Australian IP, it should be allowed to crawl Australian-targeted content.
    

Additional Considerations #

• Googlebot uses the same user-agent string globally, regardless of IP.
  
• You can verify Googlebot IP origins with reverse DNS lookups.
  
• Robots directives (robots.txt, meta robots) should be consistent across all locale versions to avoid accidentally blocking Googlebot in some locales but not others.
  

For best SEO results with locale-adaptive content: #

• Use distinct URLs per language/region instead of dynamic content changes based on IP or language detection.
  
• Use hreflang annotations to help Google understand and index your locale-specific content properly.
  
• Ensure your server and robots rules allow Googlebot to crawl all relevant locales.