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It could easily be possible. Google usually takes the most specific directive when multiple directives contradict each other If you previously had your site targeting 'international' in GSC and you had US hreflangs, Google would have still targeted to USA as US directive is more specific Since you say you had targeting set to USA (and still do) and you may have had US hreflangs which were removed, this is a bit odd. Even without hreflangs, the GSC target US users directive is still more specific and thus Google 'should' default back to that That being said, hreflangs might be a bit of a harder directive as they are actually coded onto your web pages. It may also be Google ignoring GSC directives for some sites to try and 'encourage' more webmasters to embrace hreflangs and proper internationally targeted websites Google won't look at your bounce rate I don't think. Certainly not from Google Analytics (as that's your own data and it's also really easy to manipulate, e.g: you could use JS to detect what country people are connecting from and when you serve the pages you could strip out the analytics tracking script, thus lowering the bounce rate). Google use their own data, mostly the metrics from Search Console (clicks, impressions etc) People talk about bounce rate being bad because it's bad UX (usually) and Google wants sites built with proper UX, sites that are useful to people. But the aim is to make your site better so that real people won't bounce as easily, not to get better GA bounce-rate metrics (which aren't used in Google's algorithm). Of course Google must have a way to evaluate something similar, but that number in that database wouldn't be 'the one' that they factor I would try embedding the relevant hreflangs to support your geo-targeting and additionally checking what GSC property has your US settings in.  You can always block traffic from other countries, like how if you try to view a certain series on Netflix from the UK which is only available in the USA - it says "this show isn't available in your region". If you really care that much, just do something similar (this page is not available in your region)