This article presents a new character‐level convolutional neural network model that can classify multilingual text written using any character set that can be encoded with UTF‐8, a standard and widely used 8‐bit character encoding. For geographic classification of text, we demonstrate that this approach is competitive with state‐of‐the‐art word‐based text classification methods. The model was tested on four crowdsourced data sets made up of Wikipedia articles, online travel blogs, Geonames toponyms, and Twitter posts. Unlike word‐based methods, which require data cleaning and pre‐processing, the proposed model works for any language without modification and with classification accuracy comparable to existing methods. Using a synthetic data set with introduced character‐level errors, we show it is more robust to noise than word‐level classification algorithms. The results indicate that UTF‐8 character‐level convolutional neural networks are a promising technique for georeferencing noisy text, such as found in colloquial social media posts and texts scanned with optical character recognition. However, word‐based methods currently require less computation time to train, so currently are preferable for classifying well‐formatted and cleaned texts in single languages.