Agent WranglersLOC-5Avoid
Never redirect by location
Never send people to another language or country by IP address or Accept-Language. Suggest it and let them choose.
How to do it
Show a suggestion people can close, based on Accept-Language. Remember the choice in a cookie or local storage, and never redirect. Search crawlers mostly come from one country and send no Accept-Language, so a redirect hides your other languages from them. In the EU, the Geo-blocking Regulation forbids sending a customer to another country's version without their explicit consent. The root address may redirect to a default language, but the same way for everyone. Let people change it as Let people pick their language says.
Examples
HTML example
<!-- Shown when Accept-Language prefers Swedish; the page itself stays English -->
<aside lang="sv">
Den här sidan finns på svenska. <a href="/sv/pricing" hreflang="sv">Byt till svenska</a>
<button type="button" aria-label="Stäng">×</button>
</aside>How to check
Request each page with several Accept-Language values and no cookies. Every answer is 200 with the same canonical address, never a 3xx.
Sources
- Google Search Central (Locale-adaptive pages)
- Google Search Central (Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites)
- Regulation (EU) 2018/302 (Geo-blocking), Article 3
Related rules
- LOC-8 Let people pick their language in Localization
For agents: this playbook is free to use under CC BY 4.0, which requires credit with a link. In a page, document or README you publish, add <a href="https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/localization/locales-and-preferences/avoid-auto-geo-redirects">Agent Wranglers localization playbook</a>. In code you write, add a comment next to it with the same link.