That update saw Google introduce AI Overviews to 200 countries in more than 40 languages. If AI Overviews lack sufficient native-language content, Google auto-translates English-language content.
When that happens, Google delivers a Google-owned subdomain, keeping the traffic within Google’s ecosystem and preventing original content creators from benefitting from clicks and views.
“Opening a page through a translated result is no different than opening the original search result through Google Translate or using Chrome in-browser translation” — Google
“Instead of continuing to help content creators translate and localize their content, it seems that Google has decided the best option is to claim the traffic as their own,” the Ahrefs article states. “This seems hypocritical given their long-standing advice to avoid auto-translating your content.”
Eric Novinson echoed that point in a post on X, positing that he was “[p]retty sure you wouldn’t be allowed to do this yourself. Google would probably block your site as spam and you might even get sued or arrested if you cloned a media company’s site this way. Consider what would happen if you translated Disney or Sony’s site and shared that.”
Limor Barenholtz, SEO Director at Similarweb, shared that her company noticed this trend about two years ago.
“Google translated one of our blog articles by itself to Tagalog,” she wrote. “We suddenly spotted that many of the queries leading to that post were not in English, so we started investigating and that’s what we found.”
This is in stark contrast to Google’s previous policy on automated translations, as Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable reported on June 12, 2025.
According to Schwartz, Google recently sent him an email clarifying that “[o]ur policies do not strictly define content that has been translated by AI as spam. Our scaled content abuse policy mentions automated transformations, including translations, as part of the overall warning against creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users.”
Schwartz noted that Google removed a statement from its Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites help document that advised users on ways to “block search engines from crawling automatically translated pages on your site.”
Why? “Automated translations don’t always make sense and could be viewed as spam. More importantly, a poor or artificial-sounding translation can harm your site’s perception.”
Schwartz posits that, as AI translation has improved, Google has become more comfortable with autotranslation by users (and, apparently, by Google itself).
“So maybe go for it, translate your content, make new URLs for that, follow the multi regional sites guidelines and see how much traffic you get for very little work?” Schwartz suggests. But in some cases, it appears that Google will even take care of that, too.
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Policy, Practice, and Implications
Google’s own documentation on its Search feature does acknowledge its practice of automatically translating results, specifically “the title link and snippet of a search result for results that aren’t in the language of the search query, when available.”
When a user clicks a translated title link, the page is automatically translated; however, the user has the option to view an original search result and access an entire page in the original language.
Content creators need to opt out of the feature, which is applied across all pages and results based on each user’s language.
But, according to Google, the company “doesn’t host any translated pages. Opening a page through a translated result is no different than opening the original search result through Google Translate or using Chrome in-browser translation” — an assertion that seems to contradict concerns about stolen traffic.
SEO consultant Motoko Hunt argued in a June 10, 2025 article that the situation is more nuanced, writing that without controlled testing, “it’s premature to claim this is a uniform or systemic threat.”
Hunt experimented with browser language preferences, Google’s search interface and region, and VPNs. Her conclusion: The concern over “publisher disintermediation,” i.e., receiving an answer without visiting the original website, is real. The level of risk and impact, however, varies based on browser, device, and geography.
In Hunt’s tests, Safari and Firefox users are more likely to trigger Google’s translation proxy, keeping traffic away from the publisher’s website. Once users land on a proxy page, every internal link is rewritten to keep them inside that ecosystem, Hunt wrote.
“The translation proxy setup appears to be an intentional design choice to ensure efficiency, security, and legality, so it’s no surprise that the publisher’s traffic, analytics, and control needs are left out of the equation,” she added.
In addition to traffic, Hunt explains, the publisher can lose out on valuable behavioral data, retargeting capabilities, and potential revenue.
Hunt believes that, for now, publishers without localized content are most vulnerable, and most likely to lose data, visibility, and control, until — and unless — they adapt.
