Geo-Targeting Not Working

Fix wrong-country and wrong-city proxy results, covering slugging rules (newyork, not new-york), the country/state/city hierarchy, geolocation-database disagreements and stale sticky sessions.

Nearly every geo-targeting problem is one of three things: a slugging mistake, a broken country/state/city hierarchy, or a geolocation database that simply disagrees with yours. Work through them in that order.

Username geo-targeting applies to Residential proxies. ISP and Datacenter proxies are delivered as dedicated IPs with fixed locations and no username targeting.

Check your slugs first

Geo values are slugged: lowercase, with everything except letters and numbers stripped. Dashes and spaces must go. This is the single most common cause of a wrong location.

Location	Wrong	Right
New York	`new-york`, `New York`	`newyork`
Los Angeles	`los-angeles`	`losangeles`
Winston-Salem	`winston-salem`	`winstonsalem`
United States	`united-states`	`us`

For the country, use the two-letter country code the dashboard's location selector emits, for example us. Do not spell the country out.

Respect the hierarchy: country, then state, then city

The targeting segments nest. Get the order or a required parent wrong and the finer segment is ignored.

-region-{country} sets the country.
-st-{state} sets the state or province and requires a country.
-city-{city} sets the city and requires a state.

Correct (country, state, city all present and in order):

abcxyz123def-region-us-st-california-city-losangeles

Incorrect (city with no state, so the city is not applied):

abcxyz123def-region-us-city-losangeles

A -city- segment with no -st- segment before it will not target the city. If your city keeps coming out wrong, this missing state is usually why.

A full URL with correct country/state/city targeting:

curl -x "http://abcxyz123def-region-us-st-california-city-losangeles:[email protected]:16666" https://ipinfo.io

The IP resolves to a different location than I targeted

IP geolocation is not exact, and databases disagree. ipinfo.io, the databases behind other lookup sites, and the target website's own geolocation data can each place the same IP in a different city, or occasionally a different country.

Before assuming targeting failed, check the exit IP against two or three independent sources.
An IP can be correctly placed by Proxio's data and still look "wrong" to one third-party database. That is a database disagreement, not a targeting bug.
What matters in practice is how your target site geolocates the IP, so test against the site itself when you can.

The location I want isn't available

Pick locations from the dashboard's live location list rather than guessing slugs. The selector only offers what is currently servable, and availability changes over time.

If a state or city returns no matching IP, widen to the country, or choose a nearby location the selector does offer.
A slug you invented by hand may not correspond to any available pool, so always confirm it exists in the selector first.

My sticky session is pinned to an old location

A sticky session holds one exit IP for the length of its sesstime. If you change your targeting but keep the same sessid, you can keep the old IP (and its old location) until the session expires.

After changing country, state, or city, start a new sessid so a fresh IP is selected for the new target.
Remember sesstime runs 1 to 90 minutes; the pin releases when it expires.

See Session Types for how sticky and smart sessions choose and hold IPs, and Geo-Targeting for the full parameter table.