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AI assistants don’t give the same answer to everyone. Ask ChatGPT “best home security system” from a UK context and from a US context, and you can get genuinely different brand recommendations — different retailers, different regulatory language, different local competitors. Country targeting is how Surfais captures that: every prompt in your library is scanned once per country you’ve assigned it to, and the results are tracked separately, so your visibility in the UK and your visibility in the US are two distinct numbers, not one blended average.

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What country targeting does

Every prompt carries its own list of target countries. When a scan runs, each prompt is sent to the AI platforms with a geo signal for every country it’s assigned to, and the response — and whether your brand was mentioned in it — is recorded per country. This means:
  • A prompt can be scanned in one country or several, independent of every other prompt in your library.
  • Results stay tied to the country they ran in. The Mentions feed breaks results down per country, so you can see whether a market you’ve recently entered is showing weaker AI visibility than your home market; dashboard scores aggregate across all your tracked markets.
  • Adding a country to an existing prompt doesn’t lose any history — past scan results stay tied to the countries they were actually run in.

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Choosing your markets

Pick countries the way you’d pick markets for any other channel: where your buyers actually are, not everywhere you’d theoretically like to sell. A handful of well-chosen markets scanned properly teaches you more than a long list scanned thinly — especially since your plan’s country limit is almost certainly smaller than the full list Surfais supports. Surfais defaults a new prompt’s country selection to your brand’s primary market — set once in your brand profile — when that market is trackable. From there, you choose per prompt whether to widen it. A reasonable approach for most brands: keep your core library scoped to your primary market, and deliberately widen a subset of prompts (or add market-specific ones) as you expand.
If you’re tracking multiple brands under one agency organisation, each brand has its own prompt library and assigns countries to its own prompts — but the distinct-country cap is shared across the whole account, so a new market added for one brand uses a slot for everyone. See Managing brands for how per-brand scoping works across an agency portfolio.

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Plan limits

Every plan caps how many distinct countries your account can track at once. The cap applies account-wide: it’s checked against the union of countries assigned across your entire prompt library — every brand, paused prompts included — whenever you save a prompt with a new country attached. It isn’t a separate setting you configure; on multi-brand plans, a country one brand is already using doesn’t need a new slot, but a genuinely new country does, whichever brand adds it.
Some plans offer an extra-country add-on to expand beyond the base allowance. Each purchased slot raises the shared account-wide country pool by one — it isn’t tied to a specific brand, so on multi-brand accounts any brand can use the extra headroom. Availability varies by plan and audience (brand vs agency) — check Add-ons or surfais.com/pricing for current details before assuming it’s included on your plan.
If you try to save a prompt with a country that would push you over your limit, Surfais blocks the save and tells you to remove a country or upgrade — it won’t silently drop the country or partially save the prompt.

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Per-platform geo behaviour

Surfais doesn’t just add “please answer as if I’m in France” to a prompt and hope for the best. Each of the five AI platforms handles location differently, and Surfais uses the strongest mechanism each one offers:
  • Google AI Overviews gets the most reliable geo signal of the five — it queries Google’s actual regional search index for the country (the same infrastructure a real user in that country would hit), rather than a language model guessing at local context.
  • ChatGPT and Perplexity both accept a structured location parameter that routes their web search behind the scenes through country-specific results, not just a prompt-level hint.
  • Claude uses the same kind of structured location parameter for markets it supports; for a small number of countries where that parameter isn’t accepted, Surfais automatically falls back to a language-level location hint so the scan still completes rather than failing.
  • Gemini relies on a language-level hint rather than a per-request location override — it’s the one platform in the set where geo-targeting is directional rather than infrastructure-guaranteed, and results should be read with that in mind.
The result: geo targeting is strong across four of the five platforms and workable on the fifth, rather than a single blunt instrument applied identically everywhere. For the full breakdown of what each platform supports and why, see AI platforms.

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Next steps

Setting up your prompts

Build the library that these country settings apply to.

AI platforms

What each of the five platforms measures and how geo targeting works per platform.

Brand profile

Set your brand’s primary market, used as the default for new prompts.

Plans & limits

The full picture of what’s included on each Surfais plan.