How It Works

One Script, Ten Tools

You add one lightweight script to your website. That single script powers every GeoSwap product — redirects, links, content personalization, notification bars, popups, geo blocking, cookie consents, currency conversion, conditional scripts, and route management.

No separate plugins for each feature. No juggling multiple installations. Add the script once, then turn on whichever tools you need from your dashboard. Geo Links are the one exception: they're short links served straight from our edge, so they work even on sites without the script.

RedirectsLinksContentBarsPopupsBlocksConsentsCurrenciesScriptsRoutes

What Happens When Someone Visits Your Site

Here's the full sequence, start to finish. It all happens while the page loads, and most visitors never notice.

A visitor lands on your page

Someone types your URL, clicks a link, or finds you on Google. Your page starts loading normally, including the GeoSwap script in the <head>.

The script pings our edge network

The GeoSwap script sends a lightweight request to the nearest Cloudflare edge location. With 300+ locations worldwide, there's always one close to your visitor. The answer is cached in that browser tab for 5 minutes, so as the visitor clicks around your site, most pages don't need to ask again.

We detect the visitor's location

At the edge, Cloudflare determines the visitor's country, region, and city using network-level geolocation. No third-party API calls. No IP database lookups. This is the same technology used by the world's largest websites.

Your rules are checked

The edge worker checks the visitor against your rules: do they match any of your segments? If you have a redirect for visitors from Germany, a notification bar for visitors from France, and a content swap for visitors from Japan — all of those are evaluated in one pass. Bots are detected at this step too, and they always get your original page.

The matching action is applied

If the visitor matches a rule, GeoSwap applies the action — redirect them, show different content, display a bar or popup, convert prices, or run a script. If no rule matches, the visitor sees your original page with zero changes.

Your workspace overview shows all active rules, recent activity, and real-time analytics at a glance.

Why the Edge Matters

Most geo-targeting tools make decisions on a central server, or worse, rely on slow IP-lookup APIs. GeoSwap is different. Every decision happens at Cloudflare's edge — the same network that powers 25% of the internet.

SEO Safety Built In

Geo-targeting can be dangerous for your search rankings if done wrong. Redirecting Googlebot away from your pages can tank your SEO overnight. GeoSwap is designed from the ground up to prevent this.

Search engine bots are never redirected

Googlebot, Bingbot, and other search engine crawlers always see your original page. GeoSwap detects 65+ bots and exempts them from all redirect and blocking rules automatically.

AI crawlers see your original page too

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI crawlers are detected and served your original content. Your pages stay visible and citable across both traditional and AI search.

Hreflang tags auto-generated

When you create country-based redirect rules, GeoSwap generates the matching hreflang tags and shows them on the redirect's page. Copy them into your page's <head> to tell Google about your alternate pages and avoid duplicate content issues.

Why this matters

Many geo-targeting tools use client-side JavaScript that can inadvertently redirect search engine bots. Google treats this as cloaking — showing different content to bots vs. users — which can result in a manual penalty and removal from search results. GeoSwap's architecture prevents this entirely. Learn more in the SEO Safety guide.

Segments: The Foundation

Every rule in GeoSwap is built on segments. A segment defines who you're targeting: visitors from specific countries, regions, cities, or even custom IP ranges.

The powerful part: segments are reusable. Create an "EU Visitors" segment once, then use it across redirects, content rules, bars, popups, and everything else. Change the segment definition and every rule that uses it updates automatically.

Learn more about Segments

How to create segments, targeting options (country, region, city, radius, IP), and best practices for organizing your rules.

Everything in Real Time

When you create or change a rule in your dashboard, it reaches the edge within about a minute. No deploy, no cache to clear.

Change a redirect destination and new visitors get it within about a minute.

Update a content rule and new visits see the new version.

Pause a rule and it stops applying across all 300+ edge locations.

No deploys and no cache clearing on your side.

Your rules are synced to our edge network the moment you hit save. Edge locations keep a copy for up to 60 seconds, so every location has the change within about a minute. One thing to know when testing: a browser tab that already loaded your site keeps its answer for up to 5 minutes, so check changes in a new private window.

In Summary