Geo-targeting
Choosing where your proxy exits, from country level down to city or network in some services.
Geo-targeting is the ability to request an exit address in a particular place. Country-level selection is universal; city and ASN selection are premium features.
#How it is requested
Usually as a parameter inside the proxy username, or as a dedicated port. There is no cross-provider standard, so this is a detail to confirm before writing integration code.
#Why results disagree with expectations
Geolocation is inference, not fact. Databases map addresses to places using registration records, latency measurements and self-reported data, and they update at different rates. Two lookup services will regularly disagree on the city for the same address, and occasionally on the country.
Practical consequences:
- Country-level accuracy is generally good. City-level is approximate.
- The target site uses its own geolocation source, which may differ from yours.
- Narrow targeting shrinks the available pool, which can raise failure rates even when every request is technically in the right place.
#Why the result disagrees with the request
You ask for a country and receive an address that geolocation databases place elsewhere, or a site that behaves as though you are somewhere else. Four causes account for nearly all of it.
| Cause | How to confirm it |
|---|---|
| Databases disagree with each other | Check the same address in two independent sources |
| The pool could not satisfy the request and widened it | Ask the provider what happens when a location is unavailable |
| The site uses its own signals, not the address | Compare the language headers and the browser timezone |
| The registration and the physical location differ | Common on ISP and datacenter ranges |
The second row is the one to establish before you buy. Some providers refuse an unavailable location, and some quietly serve a neighbouring one. Those are very different products, and the difference only appears when the pool is thin.
#Location is more than the address
A site infers where you are from several signals at once. If the address says one country while the Accept-Language header and the browser timezone say another, the contradiction is more informative than either signal alone. Set them together.
Verify with several samples rather than one. A single draw from a rotating endpoint describes one exit node, not the pool.