Geo steering

Geo Steering directs traffic to pools tied to specific countries, regions, or — for Enterprise customers only — data centers.

This option is extremely useful when you want site visitors to access the origin server closest to them, which improves page-loading performance.

​​ Pool assignment

You can assign multiple pools to the same area and the load balancer will use them in failover order. Any options not explicitly defined — whether in data centers, countries, or regions — will fall back to using default pools and failover.

​​ Region steering

Cloudflare has 13 geographic regions that span the world. The region of a client is determined by the region of the Cloudflare data center that answers the client’s DNS query.

​​ Via the dashboard

When creating or editing a load balancer:

1. Go to the Traffic Steering step.
2. Click Geo Steering.
3. For Region, select a region and click Add Region.
4. Click Edit.
5. Select a pool and click Add Pool.
6. If adding multiple pools, re-order them into your preferred failback order.
7. (optional) Add more regions if needed.

​​ Via the API

Use the regions_pool property of the Update Load Balancers command to specify an array of regions. Specify each region using the appropriate region code followed by a list of origin servers to use for that region.

In the example below, WNAM and ENAM represent the West and East Coasts of North America, respectively.

Request
// PUT /zones/:zone_id/load_balancers
{
  "description": "Load Balancer for www.example.com",
  "name": "www.example.com",
  "ttl": 30,
  "proxied": true,
  "fallback_pool": "ff02c959d17f7bb2b1184a202e3c0af7",
  "default_pools": ["17b5962d775c646f3f9725cbc7a53df4", "ff02c959d17f7bb2b1184a202e3c0af7"],
  "region_pools": {
    "WNAM": ["17b5962d775c646f3f9725cbc7a53df4", "ff02c959d17f7bb2b1184a202e3c0af7"],
    "ENAM": ["17b5962d775c646f3f9725cbc7a53df4", "ff02c959d17f7bb2b1184a202e3c0af7"],
    "EEU": ["ff02c959d17f7bb2b1184a202e3c0af7", "17b5962d775c646f3f9725cbc7a53df4"]
  }
}

If you only define WNAM, then traffic from the East Coast will be routed to the default_pools. You can test this using a client in each of those locations.

​​ Country steering

​​ Via the dashboard

When creating or editing a load balancer:

1. Follow the create a load balancer procedure until you reach the Traffic Steering step.
2. Click Geo Steering.
3. For Country, select a country and click Add Region.
4. Click Edit.
5. Select a pool and click Add Pool.
6. If adding multiple pools, re-order them into your preferred failback order.
7. (optional) Add more countries if needed.

​​ Via the API

When creating a load balancer via the API, include the country_pools object to map countries to a list of pool IDs (ordered by their failover priority).

To get a list of country codes, use the Region API.

Any country not explicitly defined will fall back to using the corresponding region_pool mapping (if it exists), then to the associated default pools.

​​ PoP steering

When creating a load balancer via the API, include the pop_pools object to map Cloudflare data centers to a list of pool IDs (ordered by their failover priority).

For help finding data center identifiers, refer to this community thread Open external link .

Any data center not explicitly defined will fall back to using the corresponding country_pool, then region_pool mapping (if it exists), and finally to associated default pools.