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Geoblocking explained: why websites answer differently by country
How websites decide which country you are in, why they block or change content by country, what a VPN changes, and how to test a site from many countries at once.
Key points
- Geoblocking means a website answers differently, or not at all, depending on the country a visitor seems to come from.
- Websites guess your country from your IP address. With a VPN, they see the server’s address and its country.
- The geoblocking check asks a site from 12 countries at once and shows where the answers differ.
How a website decides where you are
- Your device
- VPN server in country Agives its own address
- Websitelooks up the country of that address
The website does not see you, only the address the request comes from. Databases link that address to a country.
Most websites use IP address databases to guess the country. Some also use your account’s country, your payment method, or your device’s language. A VPN changes only the address.
Why websites block by country
| Reason | Example |
|---|---|
| Licenses | a streaming service may only show a series where it bought the rights |
| Law | a service may not be allowed in some countries |
| Security | a bank may block logins from unusual countries |
| Business | a shop may show other prices or products by country |
Whether you may use a VPN to reach a service is decided by the service’s terms, not only by law. Many services block known VPN addresses. More in Is it legal to use a VPN?.
How the geoblocking check works
- You enter a domain, such as a news site.
- One public probe in each of 12 countries requests the site’s home page at the same time.
- The table shows each country’s answer: reachable, an error, or no answer, with the response time.
- If the answers differ, that points to geoblocking or a network block. It is an indication, not proof.
The probes belong to Globalping, a public network of measurement points. Most of them run in data centers, and some websites block data-center traffic everywhere. A site can also send a normal page that says “not available in your country”, which the check cannot detect.
Why the country of a VPN location matters here
If a website should see you in a certain country, the VPN location’s address must be registered there. That is true even for virtual locations, whose server is elsewhere. But some services check more than the address, for example how fast your connection replies. In this archive, providers mark 430 of 1,673 listed locations as virtual.
Try it: run the geoblocking check for a site, then open the same site with your VPN set to a country where it answered normally.
Next step
Read The networks behind VPN servers: many providers share the same data centers, which is one reason services can block VPN addresses so easily.
The figures in this guide come from the archive and change with every data update. As of October 17, 2026.