In the early days, Google was not a fan of using tools to automatically translate your pages and then have Google index and rank those pages, even with Google Translate. But now as AI is getting better at it, Google is now okay with it, assuming the translation is helpful and useful to your users.
Google has sent me a statement months after I wrote about how Reddit AI translated pages are ranking well in Google Search. Google said:
While we don’t comment on the status of specific sites or pages, nor do we provide individualized support for any site, our 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.
As I said in that story, yes, that section in the Google policy reads:
Scraping feeds, search results, or other content to generate many pages (including through automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques), where little value is provided to users.
With that statement, Google updated the Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites help document and removed this section:
Use robots.txt to block search engines from crawling automatically translated pages on your site. 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.
It is just gone, nothing replaced it, Google just removed it.
Glenn Gabe posted on X about this saying, "In addition, Google is removing information about blocking auto-translated content from their documentation about managing multilingual sites. I had a feeling they would do that. I think it was just overlooked."
Digging in more, Glenn Gabe's Is it safe? Does Google’s evolving view of auto-translated content, and lack of action with Reddit’s AI translations, open the floodgates for site owners? pretty much predicted all of this would happen. He stressed that while over a decade ago, Google frowned on these tactics, as machine translated content gets better, Google became more accepting of the practice.
Google said they "Removed a section from our multilingual documentation about using robots.txt to block all automatically translated pages." This was done "To align with our spam policy update in March 2024. This is a docs-only change, no change in behavior," which I covered over here.
The wild thing is that Reddit, during its earnings call, said outright that Google sanctioned this for them. Glenn Gabe covered this well, he wrote, "Reddit even said, “it’s totally sanctioned (by Google)”… Wow, you can listen to that part in the video below (at 37:38 in the video)."
Google's statement, which I listed above, but will put here also, said, "While we don’t comment on the status of specific sites or pages, nor do we provide individualized support for any site."
In any event, it looks like Google is cool with you using AI to auto-translate your pages, assuming those translations work well and are helpful to your users. 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?
OK, I have an update on the Reddit AI translation situation. Google sent me a statement after I asked if they sanctioned AI translations for Reddit, if AI translations were now ok to publish, etc.
My post has been updated with the latest information...
#google #seo #reddit
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe.bsky.social) June 11, 2025 at 11:46 AM
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Basically, if the content is high quality and helpful, it's ok to use AI translations to scale. Also, Google said they don't help any site specifically (so I guess they didn't specifically help Reddit). And Google removed the "block auto-translated content' section from their multilingual doc.
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe.bsky.social) June 11, 2025 at 11:46 AM
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John Mueller from Google event replied to Glenn Gabe on Bluesky:
Thanks for adding that, Glenn!
— John Mueller (@johnmu.com) June 11, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Forum discussion at X.
