How to Change Your Location in Google Chrome (Sensors + Proxy)

There are two locations a website can read from Chrome. One is your browser location: the precise position a site gets through the Geolocation API after it asks for permission. The other is your IP location: the place your IP address points to, which every site sees without asking. To change your location in Chrome properly, you change both: the browser one with the built-in DevTools Sensors panel, and the IP one with a residential proxy in the place you want.

This guide covers each method step by step, what it changes and what it does not, and how to combine them for tasks like checking local search results.

Which method changes what

Method	Browser location	IP location	Timezone and language	Applies to
DevTools Sensors	Yes	No	Optional	One tab, while DevTools is open
Block location in site settings	Blocked	No	No	All sites or chosen ones
Chrome language setting	No	No	Language only	Every site
Proxy	No	Yes	No	All browser traffic
Sensors + proxy	Yes	Yes	Yes	One tab, full local view

The table explains most “it didn’t work” reports. A site that asks for your position will see the Sensors location. A site that never asks, which is most of them, sees only your IP.

Method 1: Change your browser location with DevTools Sensors

Chrome’s developer tools can override the position the browser reports. Nothing to install.

1. Open the page you want to test.
2. Open DevTools: press F12, or Ctrl+Shift+I on Windows and Linux, or Cmd+Option+I on a Mac.
3. Open the Command Menu with Ctrl+Shift+P (Cmd+Shift+P on a Mac), type sensors and choose Show Sensors. You can also use the three-dot menu in DevTools > More tools > Sensors.
4. In the Location section, pick a preset city such as Berlin, London, Mumbai or Tokyo.
5. For any other place, choose Other and type the latitude and longitude. You can also set a Timezone ID such as Europe/Paris and a Locale such as fr-FR.
6. Reload the page and allow location access when the site asks.

To keep a city for later, click Manage next to the list and add it with a name. The override applies only to the tab where DevTools is open, and it stops when you close DevTools.

What it does not change: your IP address. A site that checks your IP still places you at home. That is why the Sensors trick works on a map or a store locator, and often fails on a streaming site, a shop with country prices or a search engine that reads your IP first.

Method 2: Control which sites get your location

Chrome lets you decide which sites may ask for your position at all.

1. Go to Settings > Privacy and security > Site settings > Location.
2. Choose whether sites can ask, or block them all.
3. Under the list of sites, remove or block any site you want to stop.

Blocking does not hide where you are. It only stops the precise position, and sites fall back to your IP, which usually shows your city or region anyway.

To change the language sites see, go to Settings > Languages and move your preferred language to the top. Chrome sends it with every request, and many sites use it to pick a version of the page.

Method 3: Change your IP location with a proxy

To look like a visitor from another country or city on every site, change the IP. A proxy sends Chrome’s traffic out through another address, and the site sees that address instead of yours.

The quickest way is a proxy extension that handles sign-in and switches off with one click. The Shifter browser extension for Chrome and Firefox connects to Shifter’s residential network, where you pick a country, a state, a city or an ISP. Without an extension, you can set the proxy in your computer’s settings or start Chrome with a command-line flag; our guide on how to set up a proxy in Google Chrome covers all three ways.

A residential proxy uses home connections, so sites see a household IP from a local ISP. Data center and VPN addresses are easier for sites to recognise, and some show a different page to them.

Combine both for a full local view

For a clean result, all signals should point to the same place. A Berlin IP with a New York timezone and an English locale looks odd to a site that checks more than one thing.

1. Connect the proxy to the city you need, for example Berlin.
2. Open DevTools > Sensors and set Berlin, timezone Europe/Berlin and locale de-DE.
3. Put German first in Chrome’s language settings if you want the German page.
4. Open ip-info.com to confirm the IP shows Berlin, then load the site.

Our guide on matching proxy location, timezone and locale shows how to keep these in sync in automated browsers too.

Checking Google results from another city

This is the most common reason people change their location in Chrome. Google decides your location from several sources: your IP, the precise location from your browser if you allow google.com to use it, and places saved in your Google account.

A practical setup:

• Open a guest window or a profile that is not signed in, so saved places and search history do not shape the results.
• Use a proxy in the target country or city, so the IP matches.
• Set the same city in Sensors and allow location access on google.com.
• Check the bottom of the results page, which usually shows the location Google used.

For the country, adding &gl=de to the search URL asks for German results, and &hl=de sets the interface language. Neither sets a city: that comes from the IP and the precise location. If you check rankings for many cities on a schedule, doing it by hand does not scale; our page on SEO monitoring with residential proxies shows how teams run the same checks from real local IPs.

Is it allowed?

Changing what your browser reports is a normal testing and privacy step, and developers do it every day. What you do with the new location still has to follow the law and each site’s terms, especially for content licensed by region. Our guide on how to bypass geolocation restrictions legally covers where the line usually sits.

The bottom line

Chrome has two locations, and most guides change only one. DevTools Sensors changes the browser location for one tab, for free, in a minute. A proxy changes the IP location that every site sees. For maps and store finders, Sensors is enough. For prices, catalogues and search results, change the IP, and use Sensors on top when you need every signal to agree.