How to use the Search Console country filter in 2026

What changed in the Search Console country filter?

The Search Console country filter now lets you select several countries at once and shows their combined Google Search traffic in one performance report. Google released the change on October 6, 2026, along with a matching update to the device filter. The announcement was short: if you operate in multiple countries, you can now view their combined traffic. Before this, the filter took one country at a time. You picked Israel, read the numbers, switched to the United States, read them again, and added up the totals in a spreadsheet or a dashboard. Now you tick the markets you care about and click apply. The clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position on screen then cover the whole group. The change to the interface is small, but anyone selling across borders no longer has to do that tedious adding-up.

For a business that sells in Israel and abroad, this matters more than it might seem. Most of these sites have at least two language versions, and neither one maps neatly to a single country. Take a Tel Aviv accounting firm. Its Hebrew pages serve local clients, and its English pages serve founders and expats in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Its English market isn't one country. It's a group of countries, and until now there was no clean way to measure that group as one market. Now you can build the group in the filter and read it as a single number. Multilingual businesses can finally see organic traffic for every market in one Search Console report, and that's how you tell whether your content in each language is earning its keep.

Before going further, here's what the filter doesn't do. It's a reporting tool, not a targeting setting. Google removed the old international targeting option, where you told it which country a site was aimed at, back in 2022. Ticking Israel and Canada in a report sends Google no signal about where you want to rank. The things that still control which version of a page shows up where are hreflang annotations, a clear URL structure (subfolders like /he/ and /en/ are the simplest), content that's genuinely localized, and links from sites in each market. Also, the country in this report is where the searcher was, not the language they searched in. A Hebrew speaker searching from New York counts as United States traffic. That difference comes up again later in this guide.

How do you view combined traffic for several countries in Search Console?

To see combined traffic for several countries, open the Performance report for Google Search, add a country filter, tick every market you want to group, and apply it. In practice, you choose your property, go to Performance and then Search results, and open the filter options above the chart. Pick Country, and you'll get a list you can now tick multiple boxes in. Choose your markets, confirm, and the chart and totals redraw for the whole group. Set the date range before you start reading anything. Three months gives you a steady view that isn't distorted by single-week spikes. The full sixteen months Search Console keeps is the better choice when you want to see seasonality or the long-term effect of a content push. Note the range you used, because comparisons only hold up when the windows match.

The feature is most useful once you build groups that reflect how your business actually sells, rather than how the map is drawn. A typical Israeli exporter might use three: Israel on its own; an English-speaking core of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia; and a European group for the countries where its distributors or clients are. You can also add the device filter, which got the same multi-select update. Many local service searches happen on phones, so mobile-only Israel and desktop-only English markets can look very different. Search Console stores the active filters in the page address, so bookmarking each configured view gives you one-click access to your market groups. That's simpler than rebuilding them every month, and it means everyone on the team is reading the same definitions.

Once a group is active, the tabs below the chart all respect it. The Queries tab shows what people in those countries searched for. The Pages tab shows which URLs earned their clicks. The Countries tab still lists each country separately, so you can see whether one market is carrying the group's total. Use the Compare option on dates to put this quarter next to last quarter, or the month before a batch of articles went live next to the month after. Everything can be exported to Google Sheets, Excel or CSV if you want to keep a running log. Expect a delay of about two days in the most recent data. Don't panic when yesterday looks empty, and don't judge a change until a full week has been processed.

How can you compare Hebrew and English performance by country?

The cleanest way to compare Hebrew and English performance is to combine the country filter with a page filter on your language folder, so you're reading one language in one group of markets at a time. If your Hebrew pages live under /he/ and your English pages under /en/ or at the root, add a Page filter for URLs containing that path, then apply your country group on top. For more complex setups, the page filter also accepts regular expressions, which lets you include or exclude several folders at once. If your languages sit on separate subdomains or separate domains, either verify each one as its own property or use a domain property, which covers every subdomain, and filter by URL from there. Whichever setup you have, the aim is the same: clean segments you can trust.

The view that tells you the most is a simple two-by-two grid: Hebrew pages in Israel, Hebrew pages outside Israel, English pages in Israel, and English pages in your target markets abroad. Each cell answers a different question. Hebrew in Israel is your home base and should normally be your largest cell. Hebrew abroad is usually Israelis living overseas, and sometimes they're a real segment worth serving on purpose. English in Israel is common for B2B, tech and professional services, because many Israelis search in English for anything technical. English abroad is your export engine. Check all four cells every month and you'll know where each language is pulling its weight and where it's just sitting there.

Next, open the Queries tab for each cell and check for mismatches. One warning sign is English pages getting impressions in Israel for queries typed in Hebrew. That usually means Google is showing the wrong language version, often because hreflang tags are missing, broken or don't point back to each other. The opposite also happens: a Hebrew page appears for English searches abroad because it has no proper English counterpart. Both problems cost you clicks, since searchers skip results in a language they didn't search in. Fixing them won't take a content team, just a careful hreflang audit, and it's often the quickest gain a bilingual site can get. Write down what you find for each cell, so next month's check shows whether the fix worked.

What do the country numbers in Search Console not tell you?

Search Console's country numbers cover Google Search only. They don't show traffic from Bing, and they don't show visits or citations from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or the standalone Gemini app. That gap keeps growing. More and more research starts in an AI assistant, especially for B2B services and anything people compare before buying, and none of it shows up in this report. Google does count traffic from its own AI features, such as AI Overviews, within these totals, but it doesn't break it out separately. Bing has its own webmaster tools, which you should check next to Search Console, and AI referrals show up in your analytics as referral traffic. To find out whether AI assistants cite your pages at all, you'll need a different kind of check. Our free GEO score tool is a quick place to start.

Even inside Google, the numbers have quirks you should know about before you rely on them. For privacy reasons, Search Console leaves rare queries out of the query table, so the queries listed in the table add up to less than the chart total. Small markets suffer most, because a bigger share of their searches are rare. Country is based on where the searcher appears to be, so travelers, VPN users and people living abroad get counted in places you might not expect. The country data has also had glitches. After the mid-2025 core update, site owners reported impression spikes in their home country when filtering by country, while the unfiltered totals stayed flat. If a single country suddenly jumps without a clear reason, check the unfiltered view before you celebrate.

Here's an opinion that runs against how most people read these reports: in a new language market, impressions are a more honest early signal than clicks, and judging a fresh locale on clicks too early is how good strategies get abandoned. When you launch English pages for a new market, they first get indexed, then appear for long-tail searches on page two or three, and only later climb to where people click. During the first couple of months, clicks can look tiny while impressions rise steadily. That rise is evidence that Google is testing your content in front of that market. Track impressions and average position for the group first, then hold the content to account on clicks and leads once it has had a full quarter to settle in.

How do you decide which language version needs more content?

The language version that needs more content is the one where you're already showing up for real demand but not winning it. That's not automatically the one with the least traffic. Look at each market group and sort it into one of four patterns. The first is lots of impressions with an average position between roughly 8 and 20. Google sees you as relevant but not the best answer yet, so expand the pages already ranking and add supporting articles around them. The second is very few impressions at all, which points to a coverage gap: you simply don't have pages for what that market searches for. The third is a strong position with a weak click-through rate, which is a title and snippet problem, not a content problem. The fourth is clicks with no inquiries, which means you're attracting the wrong search intent.

Now for a contrarian point that many Israeli businesses need to hear. The English market is bigger, but that doesn't mean your next ten articles belong there. English results pages are crowded with publishers and companies that have been building authority for years. In many niches, Hebrew results are noticeably thinner, with fewer competitors, older pages and weaker answers. A well-written Hebrew guide can reach page one in a fraction of the time an English one takes. Run the grid from the previous section. If Hebrew in Israel shows a steady stream of positions 5 to 15, the quickest gain in organic traffic is probably at home. If you're tempted to fill the slower market with paid clicks in the meantime, first compare what SEO really costs against Google Ads over twelve months.

Turn this into a monthly habit rather than a one-time audit. Open your saved market-group views, note impressions, clicks and average position for each cell of the grid, and send the gaps straight into your content plan for the next month. Over a few cycles, you'll see which language is building momentum and which one is stalling. That kind of compounding asset is something paid ads never give you, because the traffic stops the moment the budget does. If you'd like an estimate of what closing those gaps could be worth, our SEO traffic calculator gives you a starting figure. Artiql writes native, search-ready content in Hebrew, English and the other languages you sell in, based on exactly these signals. Pricing is tailored to each business, so the next step is to book a short demo and go through your own Search Console data together.

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