Geo policy

Geo policy records which countries and regions a brand accepts traffic from, and which it refuses. It's what decides whether a click can be honoured — and, when a click elsewhere dies, whether this brand can be offered as the alternative.

Three states, not two

This is the single most important thing on the screen, and it's the thing most people get wrong on their first visit.

A geo isn't simply "allowed or not". It's one of three states:

State	What it means	What happens
Allowed	A rule names this geo and says yes	The click goes through, and the brand can be offered as a Plan B alternative when someone else's click dies.
Blocked	A rule names this geo and says no	The click is treated as dead and may be diverted elsewhere. The brand is never offered as an alternative.
Unknown	No rule names this geo	The click goes through normally, but the brand is not offered as a Plan B alternative.

Unknown is the normal state. Every brand starts with no rules at all, so every geo starts Unknown. That isn't a misconfiguration and nothing is being restricted.

Why Unknown is read two ways

Unknown lets a click through but doesn't make the brand offerable. That looks inconsistent until you see the single rule behind it: don't act without evidence.

Silence isn't a reason to divert somebody's click away from where they were going. And silence isn't evidence enough to send other people's diverted traffic here. Same rule, applied to two different questions.

To close a geo, block it explicitly

This is the corollary, and it's the reverse of how allow-lists usually work. Leaving a geo out of the policy does not refuse it. An unlisted geo is Unknown, and Unknown lets the click through.

If you want a country closed, add an explicit Blocked rule for it.

Allowing isn't switching on

Adding an allow doesn't turn the brand on for a country. It records a yes where the policy previously said nothing. That's why adding a whole region can be a large number of rules and still a small change in practice.

Rules match exactly

There's no wildcard. A geo is Allowed or Blocked only when a rule names it — you cannot write "everything except Germany" as a single rule.

That's why the editor is built around multi-select, presets and bulk actions rather than adding one country at a time: "allow everywhere except Germany" is around two hundred rules, and you shouldn't have to click two hundred times.

A region rule overrides its country rule. A region rule is the more specific statement, so if a country is allowed and one of its regions is blocked, that region is blocked.

Brand policy and program overrides

Geo rules exist at two levels.

On the brand — the base policy. This is the brand's own answer, and it applies wherever no program says otherwise.
On a program, per brand — an override. A program can have its own rules for a particular brand, and those take precedence.

Rules are always stored for a (program, brand) pair, which is why the program screen asks you to pick a brand first.

The program screen shows the effective policy: the brand's rules with this program's override merged over the top. A badge tells you which you're looking at — Program override when the program has rules of its own, Inheriting brand policy when it doesn't.

Saving on the program screen pins what you can see as the program's own rule set. After that, later changes to those geos at the brand level no longer flow through to this program.

Editing the rules

Click Edit rules to open the editor. Nothing changes until you save.

Presets

A preset (EU / EEA, North America, LATAM…) fills the country picker so you can review the expansion before adding anything. It doesn't write rules by itself. Because there's no wildcard, each country in the preset becomes its own rule. Countries Routy's geo catalogue doesn't list are skipped.

Countries

Multi-select. Pick as many as you like, then choose Add as allowed or Add as blocked — the same two buttons apply to a preset expansion and to a manual selection.

Regions

Regions only mean something inside a single country, so the region picker is enabled once you've selected exactly one country. When you pick regions, those region rules are added instead of the whole-country rule — adding both would say two different things about the same visitor.

When a geo is already set the other way

Adding never silently flips a decision you made on purpose. If some of the geos you're adding already have a rule saying the opposite, they're held back and listed for you, and you choose whether to flip them or leave them.

Bulk actions

Search the rule list, select rows (select-all covers whatever the search has filtered to), then set them allowed, set them blocked, or remove them.

Removing a rule is not the same as blocking it. A removed geo goes back to Unknown.

Observed rules

Some rules are marked Observed. Those were inferred from a conversion Routy actually recorded in that geo, rather than set by a person.

They behave like any other rule, but two things are different:

An explicit rule always wins over an observed one. Set the row to Allowed or Blocked and it becomes yours.
On a brand, saving replaces the rules people set, but observed rules the save doesn't restate are kept by the server. So clearing the editor on a brand does not necessarily silence the policy — the observed rules stay and keep deciding. The screen tells you when that's the case.

On a program, saving replaces that program's whole rule set for the brand.

Testing a geo

Country, Region and Test ask the policy engine what it would actually decide for that geo under the saved policy — not what the screen thinks. Use it after saving to confirm a change landed.

The answer is one of the three states, including Unknown.

Troubleshooting

"I removed a country but traffic still gets through." Removing leaves the geo Unknown, and Unknown lets clicks through. Add an explicit Blocked rule.

"I allowed a country but the brand still isn't offered as an alternative." Check the level you set it at — a program override for that brand takes precedence over the brand policy. Also check that the account is available as Plan B inventory on its network.

"Saving a program rule was rejected because the brand prohibits that geo." That message means the brand has an explicit Blocked rule for that geo. Allow it on the brand first, or drop it from the program's rules. A brand that simply has no rule for the geo doesn't cause this.

"I cleared everything but the policy still has rules." Observed rules survive a save on a brand. That's by design.