Geotargeting and Localization in Search APIs
How to get results as they'd appear in a specific country, city, or language.
What it means
Search results aren't the same everywhere — the same query returns different rankings, different local businesses, and sometimes an entirely different language depending on where the searcher is physically located. A SERP API exposes this as request parameters, typically a country code, a language code, and sometimes a more precise location string or lat/long pair that gets passed through to the underlying search engine's own geotargeting.
In practice
Querying best coffee shop with a location parameter set to Austin, TX returns a local pack of Austin coffee shops; the exact same query string with the location parameter set to Portland, OR returns an entirely different set of local results, even though nothing about the query text itself changed.
Tradeoffs
Precision costs something: a country-level `gl` parameter is coarse but cheap and simple, while a precise coordinate-based location gets you results that match what a real user standing at that exact spot would see, but requires more careful request construction and isn't supported identically across every provider. Language and country parameters can also interact in non-obvious ways — requesting French-language results doesn't automatically mean France-located results.