But should rankings in Google be surging for that AI translated content? In my post I explain the Reddit surge across countries, the translated content that’s ranking well, what Google’s stance has been about machine translating content, and more.
Update: April 2, 2025
Based on the hreflang setup for some urls, Reddit is translating some content into up to 22 different languages via AI. You can learn more below.
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The March 2025 core update completed this morning and I’ve been sharing about the surges and drops I’m seeing across verticals. There have been some big swings with this update across sites, verticals, and countries. I will be sharing more about the update in the coming weeks after the dust settles.
Well, yesterday Lily Ray shared about forums dropping overall and I have also seen that trend. And that’s big news considering how many forums surged with the “Hidden gems” update in the fall of 2023. Not all forums are dropping, but a number of them are tanking with this update. And that led me to call this the “Hiding Gems” update versus “Hidden Gems” update.
And when talking about user-generated content (UGC), it’s to hard overlook the biggest and most visible of them all – Reddit. Yep, it looks like Reddit is surging again with the March core update. I know that’s hard to believe since it has skyrocketed in visibility since the fall of 2023, but I am seeing more surges across countries.
And when taking a closer look at the increase, I’m seeing more of a surge in certain countries for Reddit, which led me to check the content that is surging in rankings. Based on checking that content, I saw many of Reddit’s AI translations in the mix. And it’s millions of translated urls ranking in Google for certain countries.
For example in France:
And here is the translated content with the tl=fr parameter, which links back to the original content. From what Reddit has explained, this is machine-translated content.
As a reminder, Reddit explained last year that it would start using AI translation (machine translation) to translate content into several other languages. They started with French but now have expanded to a number of other languages. Actually, in their Q3 2024 quarterly earnings, Reddit explained they are spending millions of dollars per quarter on machine translation. Here is more from the article:
In addition, they said the impact has been dramatic and even mention the benefit of that content getting indexed by Google.
Note, Google has always said that auto-translating content using machine translation is not ok. Humans should be involved with the translation to make sure the content is not low quality. So translated content is fine, but auto-translated content is not fine (SEO-wise). You can see Google’s scaled content abuse spam policy below where it mentions auto-translating content.
Can Reddit Do What Others Can’t Do?
When the French translations began last year, I shared on X that other sites have gotten manual actions for pumping tons of auto-translations on their sites (if those auto-translations are indexable). I’ve had companies reach out in the past after receiving manual actions… In addition, some have gotten hit by spam updates, which are algorithmic. Regardless, most sites cannot get away with mass-translating content via AI (or machine translation tools) without getting hammered by Google.
But Reddit is surging, and across countries and languages. Here is my tweet from last May when I read about Reddit’s auto-translations.
In addition, and before you run and check this, remember that Reddit provides a robots.txt for Google and other search engines specifically, so you can’t see the directives without using a tool like the rich results test. You will see a blanket disallow instead (which again, isn’t really what Google sees). When using the rich results test, you can see that they are explicitly allowing crawling of those translated urls via Allow directives in their robots.txt file.
Below, you can see the increases in visibility across several countries. I’ll just provide a few countries, but you can check the rest on your own. I have also provided a sample url below each country’s graph so you can see what that content looks like. I filtered the reporting by urls with the tl= parameter which is set for each language. Check out the increases below…
Here is a sample url: https://www.reddit.com/r/witcher/comments/1hddrui/so_what_are_your_guesses_for_the_release_date_of/?tl=fr
Sample url: https://www.reddit.com/r/namenerds/comments/177hddj/johan_name_meaning/?tl=hi
Sample url: https://www.reddit.com/r/SGExams/comments/1i2l47u/ki_history_econs_math_in_jc/?tl=fil
Sample url: https://www.reddit.com/r/pestcontrol/comments/1ab9fke/need_new_trap_ideas_for_mice/?tl=es-es
hreflang reveals AI translations for many countries:
I was curious about how many languages Reddit was translating content to via AI, so I double checked the hreflang setup on some pages. I’m seeing Reddit translate content to as many as 22 languages for some content. So the amount of AI translated content is even higher than I originally though. I don’t know how much content is being translated into each of those languages, but it could be a ton.
For example, you can see the hreflang tags when testing urls via the rich results tool. There are even more than the screenshot shows:
URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/PlanetOfTheApes/comments/168i8gh/a_new_timeline_for_the_planet_of_the_apes/?tl=tr
Again, Can Reddit Do What Other Sites CANNOT Do?
I’ll keep an eye on this to see how that translated content ends up performing over time. Note, the March core update officially completed this morning (3/27) so that content did well based on the update. I’ll update this post if there is anything new to add.
GG