Radius Targeting on Google and Meta, Compared

Google Ads and Meta both answer the question “who counts as nearby?” by weighing the same two signals — physical presence versus shown interest — but they resolve that tension very differently. Google lets you target a radius around an address with a hard 1 km minimum enforced by privacy thresholds, and separately asks you to choose between “Presence” (only people physically or regularly in the area) and the default “Presence or Interest,” which adds people who have searched for or shown interest in the area. Meta no longer offers its old four-option location-type selector; today “Locations” is a single audience control that defaults to people who live in, or have recently spent time in, the targeted area, plus an optional expansion checkbox that Meta says you may see checked by default for city and region targets. Meta’s documented radius bounds differ by method, and on Meta only, Special Ad Category campaigns are locked to a minimum radius of 15 miles (25 km) in the U.S. and Canada, or 15 km in Europe.

The most common misconfiguration on both platforms is treating these settings as a hard geofence. Neither platform claims that. Google calls location targeting its “best effort” and says 100% accuracy is not guaranteed (Google Ads Help — Target ads to geographic locations), and Meta says the same about its own signals (Meta Business Help Center — About location targeting in Meta Ads Manager). Here is how each platform decides who is nearby, the myths the top-ranking guides still repeat, and how to set both up. If you are still deciding how to split spend between the two, start with our Google + Meta ads overview.

How Google Ads decides who is nearby

Google says physical location is typically based on the IP address, alongside signals such as GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and its own cell-ID location database. Location of interest is inferred separately — from search terms, search history, prior physical locations, page content, and Google Maps activity — and is not restricted to the user’s own country (Google Ads Help — About targeting geographic locations). Four rules matter most on Google Ads:

• The radius floor is 1 km, and it is not arbitrary. Google’s help center states: “we do not allow radius targeting under 1 km around any given location” — about 0.62 miles — tied to minimum-area and minimum-user-count privacy thresholds (Google Ads Help). A privacy mechanism, not a UI quirk, so there is no workaround.
• “Presence or Interest” is the default. Advanced location options apply both presence and interest signals unless you restrict to Presence-only; location exclusions default to Presence (Google Ads Help — About advanced location options). In the API, a radius criterion (ProximityInfo) cannot be excluded at all — only standard locations can (Google Ads API — Location targeting).
• Google may spill into related areas. When a targeted area has low population or insufficient data, Google may also show your ad in nearby, closely related areas (Google Ads Help).
• There are edge cases. Hotel Ads campaigns cannot be targeted by radius at all (Google Ads Help), and radius targeting around location assets only works if all attached business locations are in the U.S. (Google Ads Help — Refine your location targeting).

One newer mechanism most guides ignore: ad-group-level “Locations of interest” inside AI Max for Search campaigns, which matches a searcher’s query-mentioned location even when they are physically elsewhere — Google’s example is matching a user in Chicago searching for “hotels in Madrid” but not one searching for “hotels in Paris” (Google Ads Help). None of the pages we reviewed while researching this topic in July 2026 mentioned it.

How Meta decides who is nearby

Meta’s default reaches people who live in, or have recently spent time in, the selected countries, regions, cities, postal codes, and certain U.S. regional units such as Comscore Markets and congressional districts (Meta Business Help Center). Critically, Locations acts as an audience control: Meta will not target beyond your selected locations unless you have separately enabled “Reach more people likely to respond to your ads” (Meta Business Help Center — Use location targeting).

That checkbox deserves attention when you run Meta ads locally. For a city or region target it may be checked by default, and it expands delivery — within the same country only — to people showing interest through recent visits, search and Marketplace activity, ad and Page engagement, friends in the area, or living in nearby towns. Meta cites a 6.7% lower cost per result, but also advises unchecking it for sensitive verticals or any business that only wants people living in or recently in specific locations (Meta Business Help Center — How to reach people interested in your selected cities and regions).

On radius size, Meta’s Marketing API documents two different ranges depending on the anchor: a city-anchored radius runs 10–50 miles (17–80 km), capped at 250 city entries, while a custom location anchored to a pin or street address runs 0.63–50 miles (1–80 km). The same reference lists only two location types — home and recent — and defaults to both (Meta for Developers — Marketing API Basic Targeting reference). In the self-serve UI, practitioner Jon Loomer reports the default city radius shows as +25 miles and can only be lowered to +10 miles (Jon Loomer Digital, March 31, 2025), consistent with the API’s city-anchored range.

Multi-location businesses get store sets: an Automatic radius (set by Meta from population density) or a Fixed radius in miles or kilometers around each store, with all stores in a single country (Meta Business Help Center — Use Store Set Location Targeting).

The Meta-only rule most guides skip: Special Ad Categories

If you advertise housing, employment, or credit and financial products on Meta, radius targeting works under forced constraints the typical explainer never mentions. Location selection must cover an area at least equal to a 15-mile (25 km) radius in the U.S. and Canada, or 15 km in Europe, around any selected city, address, or dropped pin; zip-code, neighborhood, and other granular geo types are disallowed, and location exclusion is not supported (Meta for Developers — Special Ad Categories). Since January 21, 2025, advertisers based in the U.S. or showing ads to U.S. audiences must use the “Financial products and services” category for those campaigns, and ads risk rejection without it (Meta Business Help Center).

Two clarifications. First, this is Meta-only — nothing in the Google sources we verified describes an equivalent forced minimum radius. Second, whether your business falls into a Special Ad Category can have legal dimensions; the platform requirement above is the factual part, and you should confirm your own classification with a qualified professional. Miscategorization is a common cause of rejections — see why ads get disapproved on Google and Meta.

Five myths the current top results still repeat

Myth 1: Meta still has four location-type options

Several ranking guides describe a dropdown offering everyone-in, live-in, recently-in, and traveling-in options. That selector is gone. Meta’s current help article describes only the combined living-in/recently-in mechanism (Meta Business Help Center), and the Marketing API accepts only home and recent as location types (Marketing API reference). Jon Loomer dates the consolidation to roughly 2023 — “about two years ago” as of his March 2025 article (Jon Loomer Digital). Caveat: that timing rests on a single practitioner account, with no corroborating Meta changelog.

Myth 2: “Presence” is the Google default

It is not. “Presence or Interest” is the default and recommended setting. Google reports that advertisers who switched from Presence to Presence-or-Interest in the Travel, Real Estate, and Education verticals saw +5% more conversions on Search campaigns, per Google internal data from 2022 (Google Ads Help). Presence is the narrower opt-in for sensitive verticals or strictly local intent.

Myth 3: You can set a quarter-mile radius on Google

The interface will not accept a radius under 1 km, and because the floor is a privacy-threshold mechanism tied to minimum area and minimum user counts, it cannot be worked around (Google Ads Help).

Myth 4: Excluding a ring around your Meta radius stops leakage

Because Meta’s signal is presence-based (live in OR recently in), excluding the surrounding ring also removes people who live inside your target but were travelling in the excluded zone. Loomer’s exact framing: “worth trying if you’re running into major issues, but it’s certainly no magical solution” (Jon Loomer Digital). A weak last resort, not a fix.

Myth 5: Meta has one universal radius range

Blog posts commonly cite a flat “1–50 miles” or “1–70 km.” Neither matches Meta’s documentation: 10–50 miles for city-anchored radius, 0.63–50 miles for pin/address-anchored custom locations (Marketing API reference). These are API-documented bounds; the Ads Manager UI is not guaranteed to display identical numbers in every locale.

Google vs. Meta radius targeting at a glance

Setting both up correctly, step by step

• Step 1: Decide the targeting shape first — country/region, city or postal-code area, or a radius around a point — and confirm your campaign type supports radius. Google disallows it for Hotel Ads.
• Step 2: In Google Ads, set the radius under Locations with an address and a distance. Treat the 1 km rejection as a hard floor, not a suggestion.
• Step 3: Explicitly choose between Presence and Presence-or-Interest under advanced location options rather than accepting the default silently. Sensitive or strictly local businesses should pick Presence; exclusions already default to Presence.
• Step 4: If you want radius targeting around location assets, confirm every attached business location is in the U.S. first.
• Step 5: For geographic query-intent matching independent of physical presence, use the AI Max “Locations of interest” ad-group setting.
• Step 6: In Meta Ads Manager, set Locations at the ad set’s Audience level. Locations is an audience control, so Meta will not target beyond it unless you opt into expansion.
• Step 7: For city or region targets, make an explicit decision on “Reach more people likely to respond to your ads.” It pulls in same-country people with intent, not just residents; Meta recommends unchecking it for strict local-only campaigns.
• Step 8: Multi-location Meta advertisers should build a store set (single country) with Automatic or Fixed radius per store instead of duplicating ad sets per location.
• Step 9: Before launching any housing, employment, or credit/financial-services campaign on Meta, declare the correct Special Ad Category up front and expect the 15-mile/25 km (U.S./Canada) or 15 km (Europe) minimum, no zip-level targeting, and no exclusions.
• Step 10: Validate delivery with platform reporting, not inference. On Meta, use Breakdown > Geography (Country or Region) in Ads Manager rather than eyeballing where ad comments come from — organic reach and Meta’s free preview impressions both distort that signal. On Google, check geographic performance reports before reallocating budget. If results still look wrong, run our first-campaign diagnostic.
• Step 11: Skip the ring-exclusion workaround on Meta except as a last resort. Invest instead in ad copy, creative, and form fields that name the target area, so out-of-area clickers self-select out.

What we could not confirm

Honesty cuts both ways; here is what we could not verify from a primary source:

• We did not log into a live Meta Ads Manager account to confirm the exact radius slider bounds shown to self-serve advertisers today. The mile/km figures come from the Marketing API reference plus one practitioner report; no consumer-facing Meta help article states the numeric bounds at all.
• The date Meta removed the four-option selector is approximate and rests on Loomer alone; we found no Meta changelog for it.
• How Meta determines “living in” versus “recently in” is no longer documented. Loomer notes his description traces to a 2018 write-up and flags that he cannot say it still holds, so we have not presented those mechanics as current.
• Google never publishes the numeric user-count threshold behind the 1 km floor, and we could not confirm the floor is uniform across every country and campaign type.
• Everything here is as officially documented, not empirically verified: we did not run live micro-budget tests of whether a 1 km Google radius or a 0.7-mile Meta pin restricts impressions as described.

Where this leaves a local advertiser

On both platforms, “nearby” is a probabilistic audience definition, not a fence. The costly mistakes are all default-acceptance mistakes — leaving Presence-or-Interest on for a walk-in-only business, leaving Meta’s expansion checked for a strictly local campaign, or discovering the Special Ad Category floor only when ads get rejected.

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