Why the same search looks different in another country

When Dr. Pete Meyers was out here for SMX Sydney, he told me about a test he'd run for a talk in the Czech Republic. He ran a set of English queries on google.cz and a lot of the search features he expected just weren't there. Then he switched to a Czech query set, and "those features jump back up".

His explanation was simple. A brand that's big in the Czech Republic gets a knowledge panel there and nothing in the US, because Google knows "what's a brand and who's famous and what sports they care about". So if you sit in one country, run English searches against another country's Google and conclude the features aren't there, Pete's verdict was blunt: "you're missing the point entirely. That's because that's not the ecosystem of what's happening if you're a native searcher, and they know that."

The features travel, the context doesn't

The surprising part of Pete's answer was how similar the countries were. Comparing Australia with the US, he found them "less different than I thought they would be": "virtually everything that's rolled out in the U.S. is rolled out here, feature-wise." The paid side differed more, mostly because of regulators. The EU in particular was pushing back on Google.

It used to be slower. A US launch would reach Europe "three months later", and Asian languages a year after that.

What couldn't be rolled out was local knowledge. For news, Google needed trusted local sources before it could show anything useful: "if your query's in Czech, you don't want the New York Times back, probably. You want a trusted local news source." And as Pete put it, "you can't cheat that. That has to be built."

It's Gary Illyes's "without" problem from understand the context, just at the scale of a whole country.

Language is the easy part

Gianluca Fiorelli started international on day one. His first SEO job was a small tourist hotel with a site in Italian, English, French, Spanish and German: "I needed to target in five different languages in five different countries." Italy, he said, is a rich market but a small one, so Italian businesses have always had to sell outside it.

He studied philology, which lets him do "a first level keyword research in French" without being fluent. Then he hands it to a local SEO to do it properly. A translated keyword list is a starting guess, not research.

The bigger differences aren't words at all. I asked Nathalie Nahai about buying behaviour across countries and she had examples ready. In Germany, "if you're going into e-commerce you have to give free shipping and you have to pay for people sending you loads of stuff back because otherwise they won't buy from you." In Brazil a lot of it was cash on delivery: the courier comes to your door, you inspect the goods, then you pay. She added that trust, and how much personal data people are willing to hand over, also changes from culture to culture. A perfectly translated checkout still loses the sale if the payment option isn't there. It's design for users, for users who live somewhere else.

Tactics differ too. When I interviewed Lily Ray in 2022, she'd just been travelling and speaking, and in Argentina she found SEOs "so focused on like link building" in a way that felt like her own work years earlier. At SMX Paris she told the room, "You should stop buying links. It's not a good idea," and people lined up afterwards asking what she meant. Her take was generous: "the indexes are different in different countries and different tactics work differently in different places" (Lily's interview).

And sometimes the difference is just the clock. Jason Acidre ran his agency from Manila with every client in the US, UK, New Zealand or Australia. The hardest part, he said, was rearranging "all of my week schedule" into night time to work closely with US clients. Serving a market from somewhere else is fine. You just have to live on its time.

Don't hide the Mexican prices by IP

The mistake Gianluca sees most isn't technical ignorance. It's a decision from above. His example: a client whose bosses were saying "we don't want to show to people in Spain the same offer we are doing to Mexicans", so they swapped content based on IP. It doesn't even work: someone in Spain can use a VPN, or just click through to the Mexican pages. Google's own guidance is to "avoid automatically redirecting users from one language version of a site to a different language version".

What Gianluca liked instead was Amazon's approach: separate country domains, and if you land on the wrong one, a banner suggests the right one. The longer version of his thinking, including why he rated Apple's country selector, is in our written interview with Gianluca.

Lily had the reader's side of this. In Germany she clicked a New York magazine story about a house fire in her own Brooklyn neighbourhood and got "sorry, you can't read this article." Between GDPR banners and geo blocks, she said, "browsing the web is an entirely different experience there." If you block or redirect by location, somebody who genuinely belongs on that page will hit the wall.

AI answers have an accent too

This all matters more in 2026, because AI answers are localised the same way. In October 2025 Google took AI Mode to more than 200 countries and territories, adding more than 35 languages, and Czech was one of them. In May this year Liz Reid, Google's head of Search, said AI Mode uses the existing ranking systems to ground its answers based on where the user is. Which is Pete's native searcher again, with a chat box on top.

The citation studies point the same way. Weglot, who sell website translation so take it with that in mind, looked at 1.3 million AI citations and found that Spanish queries run from US locations drew only about 32% of their citations from Spanish content. Run from Mexico City, that jumped to about 63%.

So if you check your AI visibility for Poland by asking ChatGPT in English from Adelaide, you've made Pete's google.cz mistake again.

What we did on wojcast.com

We rebuilt this site this year in English, Spanish, French and Polish. Each language has its own folder. Translated pages list their other versions with hreflang, plus an x-default pointing at the English one, and a page only claims a language it actually exists in. Transcripts are English only, so they don't pretend otherwise, and an untranslated page sitting under /es/ is marked noindex rather than passed off as Spanish. It's a small site, but the plumbing is the same one a big retailer needs.

An international SEO checklist

Pete's full answer on Australian and Czech results is in his interview from SMX Sydney, and the whole conversation is on his episode page.

None of this needs a big budget. You just have to stop searching as yourself, because the result you see isn't the one your customer sees.