Block Countries
The country-block setting lets you exclude traffic from specific countries from your page view counts. When a country is blocked, beacons from that country's IP ranges are not recorded.
What country blocking does
When you add a country to the block list in your site settings, visitors whose IP addresses resolve to that country's registered ranges are excluded from counting. Their beacons arrive at the server but are not added to your page view totals. The visit count in your dashboard reflects only the countries that are not on the block list.
The block operates at the server level, before any counters are incremented. It is not a dashboard filter that hides counts already recorded — it prevents recording from happening in the first place. Countries added to the block list stop contributing to counts from the moment the change is saved. Countries removed from the list resume contributing from the next visit forward.
Country blocking is configured per site. If you have three sites under your account, each site has its own block list. Blocking a country on one site has no effect on the other sites. You can apply the same countries to each site individually, or set different rules for different sites depending on their intended audiences.
How country detection works
Country assignment is based on the IP address of the network request that delivers the beacon. The server looks up the IP address against a maintained geolocation database and assigns the country code it finds. That code is compared to the block list before any counting happens.
IP-to-country mapping is approximate by nature. A single IP block may be registered to a country that does not match the physical location of every device using an address in that block. The accuracy is high for most addresses but is not guaranteed for every case, particularly for mobile carrier IP ranges and for addresses that are frequently reassigned.
The most significant limitation of country detection is that it cannot see through anonymizing tools. A visitor connecting through a VPN or proxy appears to originate from the exit node's country, not from their actual location. If a visitor in a blocked country connects through a VPN exit node in an unblocked country, the block does not apply — the server sees the VPN's country. Country blocking is effective for ordinary traffic but is not a control that holds against deliberate circumvention.
Effect on page view counts and quota
Blocked countries do not contribute page views to your totals and do not consume your page view quota. If you serve a country that was sending a meaningful share of your traffic and you add it to the block list, your total page view count will drop and your quota will last longer. This is the intended outcome — the quota counts the audience you are actively choosing to measure.
The drop in counts when you block a previously active country can be significant if that country was contributing a large share of visits. If you are using your page view totals as a measure of reach or as a benchmark for content decisions, be aware that the comparison changes once a country is blocked. Counts from before and after the block represent different measurement scopes.
The bot filter and the country block operate independently. Bot traffic from a blocked country is excluded by either filter, whichever applies first. Real visitor traffic from a blocked country is excluded by the country block. Real visitor traffic from an unblocked country goes through the bot filter as normal.
What country blocking does not cover
Country blocking through StatelessID applies only to whether beacons are counted. It does not affect whether your web server responds to requests from blocked countries, whether your pages are accessible to visitors in those countries, or whether search engines index your content from those regions. If your intent is to restrict access to your site itself, that control needs to happen at the server, CDN, or firewall level — StatelessID's block affects counting only.
If you have a legal requirement to block access to certain regions — not just to stop measuring them — implement that at the infrastructure layer and treat the StatelessID country block as a complementary counting filter. The two work at different levels and serve different purposes. Neither substitutes for the other.
If you are unsure whether you need country blocking, the most common reason to use it is to keep your counts representative of the specific audience your site is intended to serve. If your site is a local service in one country and you are seeing a large share of page views from regions where the service is irrelevant, blocking those regions keeps the dashboard focused on the traffic you actually care about.
Troubleshooting
If traffic from a blocked country is still appearing in your counts, the most likely explanation is that those visitors are connecting through a VPN or proxy in an unblocked country. The block is applied to the IP address the server sees. If that address is in an unblocked country, the visit is counted. There is no reliable way to filter traffic that deliberately masks its origin through a privacy tool.
If you added a country to the block list and your total page view count did not drop as expected, it is possible that the blocked country was contributing less traffic than you thought, or that the change has not been applied to in-flight beacons from sessions already in progress. Counts should reflect the block on the next full page load after the change is saved.
If you blocked a country by mistake and want to reverse the decision, open site settings, locate the country block list, and remove the entry. The change takes effect immediately for new beacons. Counts from before the removal are not affected — they reflect the measurement scope that was active when they were recorded.