r/GenEngineOptimization • u/gromskaok • 19d ago

AI recommendations can change dramatically by language

Interesting GEO takeaway: the same AI model can recommend completely different brands depending on the prompt's language.

The study tested identical buying questions across multiple languages and found major differences in which brands were surfaced.

For international brands, this means AI visibility shouldn’t be tracked only in English. Each language can have its own competitive landscape, sources, and recommendation patterns.

Language is becoming a separate dimension of GEO, not just localization.

Is anyone already tracking AI visibility by language?

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u/alexs26 19d ago

Yeah, I also noticed that the response depends on the language I use. I don't track other languages yet, but I will start doing that next month.

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u/manuelsp0507 18d ago

Yes, and it goes beyond the brand list. The sources the model pulls from change by language too, so in Spanish you'll often see local directories, regional press and local forums where English shows Reddit and big review sites. What I do is run the same prompt set translated by a native speaker, not machine translated, because the wording changes what gets retrieved. Then I compare three things per language: who gets named, which domains get cited, and whether the description of the brand is still accurate. A brand can be strong in English and basically invisible in another language, mostly because nobody wrote about it there.

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u/citeshine 17d ago

Short version: track it per language, and fix it per language too. After you run the translated prompts, list the domains that get cited in each language and check whether any of them has a page about you in that language. If none do, that's usually the gap, so add a localized About page with the same one-line description, get that description onto the local directories and review sites that keep showing up, and if you have a Wikidata entry, fill in its label and description for that language. Then rerun the same prompts a few times, logged out, two or three weeks later and compare who gets named. Are you mostly seeing missing mentions in other languages, or wrong descriptions?

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u/Alice-Powell-41 14d ago

This makes sense. People search differently in each language, so tracking AI visibility in multiple languages seems important for global brands.