This post was sponsored by Weglot. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
When Google’s AI Overviews launched in 2024, dozens of questions quickly surfaced among SEO professionals, one being: if AI now curates and summarizes search results, how do websites earn visibility, especially across languages?
Weglot recently conducted a data-driven study, analyzing 1.3 million citations across Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT to determine if LLMs cite content in one language, would they also cite it in others?
The result: translated websites saw up to 327% more visibility in AI Overviews than untranslated ones, a clear signal that international SEO is becoming inseparable from AI search.
What’s more, websites with another language available were also more likely to be cited in AI Overviews, regardless of the language the search was made.
The Changing Nature of Search
This shift is redefining the rules of visibility. AI Overviews and large language models (LLMs) now mediate how information is discovered. Instead of ranking pages, they “cite” sources in generated responses.
But with that shift comes a new risk: if your website isn’t available in the user’s search language, does AI simply overlook it, or worse, send users to Google Translate’s proxy page instead?
The risk with Google’s Translate proxy is that while it does the translation work for you, you have no control over the translations of your content. Worse still, you don’t get any of the traffic benefits, as users are not directed to your site.
The Study
Here’s how the research worked. To understand how translation affects AI visibility, Weglot focused the research on Spanish-language websites across two markets: Spain and Mexico.
The study was then split into two phases. Phase one focused on websites that weren’t translated, and therefore only displayed the language intended for their market, in this case, Spanish.
In that phase, Weglot looked at 153 websites without English translations: 98 from Spain and 55 from Mexico. Weglot deliberately selected high-traffic sites because they offered no English versions.
Phase two involved a comparison group of 83 Spanish and Mexican sites with versions in both Spanish and English. This allowed Weglot to directly compare the performance of translated versus untranslated content.
In total, this generated 22,854 queries in phase one and 12,138 in phase two. The methodology converted the top 50 non-branded keywords of each site into queries that users would likely search, and then these were translated between the Spanish and English versions.
In total, 1.3 million citations were analyzed.
The Key Results
Untranslated Sites Have Very Low AI Search Visibility
The findings show that untranslated websites experience a substantial drop in visibility for searches conducted in non-available languages, despite maintaining strong visibility in the current available language.
Diving…
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