Why it matters
Google advised against clever geo-redirecting because it very often goes wrong, and its documentation explains why: Googlebot mostly crawls from the US without Accept-Language, so automatic redirects can hide every other version from it.
How to meet it
Serve the requested URL as it is and suggest another version with a dismissible banner or the language selector. Point x-default at a language selector or a generic page instead of redirecting from the root.
How to test it
curl -I on each country URL with IP addresses or Accept-Language headers of other countries: no 3xx to another version.
How Regensbot covers it
Decided from one URL.
An audit reads the response, the headers, the HTML, robots.txt, the sitemaps and the structured data, and the finding shows the evidence it saw.
Sources
Google documents02
- 01Managing multi-regional and multilingual sitesGoogle Search Central (opens in a new tab)
- 02How Google crawls locale-adaptive pagesGoogle Search Central (opens in a new tab)
Claims in the knowledge base02
- D2-C383ConfirmedHandling web duplicationShown on screen
- D2-C561SourceFocusing on Internationalisation and LocalisationGoogle's documentation
Claim IDs refer to the Search Central Live 2026 knowledge base. The knowledge base (opens in a new tab)
- Confirmed
- Google's documentation states the same thing.
- Source
- The claim is the cited document itself.