---
title: Location filter has better matching for states and regions
description: Location filters in Jobs and Company search now use the normalized locations array for improved geographic matching across states, regions, and cities
url: https://theirstack.com/en/product-updates/2025-08-19-improve-location-filter-in-jobs
---

We've enhanced location filtering in the [Jobs Search endpoint](/en/docs/api-reference/jobs/search_jobs_v1) and job filters in the [Company Search endpoint](/en/docs/api-reference/companies/search_companies_v1) by improving how `location_pattern_or` and `job_location_pattern_not` filters work.

-   **Before:** Searching for "California" only matched jobs with "California" in the location string
-   **Now:** Returns all jobs from any city within California (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, etc.) or cities containing "California" in the name

#### Previous limitations

Location filtering used only the basic `location` field, which had several limitations:

-   **Unstructured data** - Location information wasn't standardized. For example, in some jobs the location was "San Francisco, CA" and in others it was "San Francisco, California".
-   **Inconsistent details** - State names, city names, and country information weren't always available or standardized
-   **Limited search accuracy** - You could only match exact text patterns in the location string

#### What's improved

These filters now search across the enhanced `locations` attribute (introduced in our [August 8 update](/en/product-updates/2025-08-08-locations-property)) instead of just the basic `location` field. This provides more accurate geographic matching using structured location data with normalized city and state information.

This enhancement leverages our [location normalization process](/en/docs/data/job/data-workflow#cleaning--standardization) to deliver significantly better geographic search accuracy across all [job sources](/en/docs/data/job/sources).