How AI assistants find your site in other languages

People ask assistants the questions they used to type into a search box, and they ask in their own language. Which clinic near me does this. What does this part cost. Does this store ship here. The assistant answers in that language, and when it needs facts it doesn't have, it searches the web and reads pages.

There is nothing special about how it reads them. It fetches a page at an address, the way a search engine does, and works with what's there. So the things that make a page findable to a search engine make it findable to an assistant, and the things that hide it from one hide it from the other.

What an assistant can and can't do with an English page

It can read it. Assistants read across languages, so if one lands on your English page while answering a Spanish question, it can use what it finds and answer in Spanish.

What it can't do is send the person to a Spanish page of yours if there isn't one. The link it gives is to the English page, the person lands there, and the browser offers to translate. And before any of that, it has to land on your page at all. The searches it runs to answer a Spanish question are in Spanish, and Spanish searches, as a rule, turn up pages in Spanish. A page that exists only in English is at a disadvantage in that search before anyone has read a word of it.

What makes a page findable, in any language

The list is the one search engines have asked for all along.

1. A real address per language. es.yoursite.com/about/ or yoursite.es/about/. Not a query string, not a cookie, not a page that changes language based on the visitor's settings. A page that shows different languages at the same address can only be indexed in one of them.
2. hreflang on every page, so the Spanish page and the German page are understood as versions of the same thing, and the right one is shown for the right search.
3. Headings and keywords in the language. The words someone types are matched against the words on the page. If the heading is still in English, the Spanish search has nothing to match.
4. Translated text in the page itself. Text that only appears after a script runs is a gamble. Serve it in the page.
5. Internal links in the language. A Spanish page that links to English pages tells a crawler your Spanish section is one page deep.
6. A language switcher that links each page to its other versions, so crawlers and people can move between them.
7. The same page every time. A crawler or an assistant that fetches your page twice should get the same words twice.

What FluentC does on that list

• 1 and 5. FluentC Domains serves each language from its own subdomain or country domain, and links inside the translated page point at the translated versions of the pages they link to.
• 2. hreflang is set for you.
• 3 and 4. FluentC translates the page and serves it as a page, so translated pages carry keywords in the language.
• 6. One snippet on your site shows the language switcher.
• 7. Translations are saved, so every visitor and every crawler gets the same words.

On WordPress, the plugin does the same with subdirectory addresses, and translates meta titles, descriptions and slugs for your SEO plugin. The details are in how the plugin handles multilingual SEO.

A note on product pages

For a store, the thing people ask an assistant about is the product: what it's called, what it does, whether it ships to them. Product pages in the shopper's language, each on its own address, are what an assistant has to work with when it answers. See translating an online store.

What this doesn't promise

No tool can promise where you'll appear in an assistant's answer, any more than it can promise a search ranking. What you can control is whether there's a page in that language for it to find. That part is a setup, not a campaign: three steps in the dashboard.