Reddit uses AI to translate millions of pages and Google’s OK with it
Google also removed the section in their help docs on using the robots.txt to block all automatically translated pages.
A number of sites are using AI tools to translate their content, some are even auto-translating millions of pages and pieces of content across their websites. Reddit was one of the most notable, but we’ve covered others.
Glenn Gabe, an SEO consultant, asked Is it safe to do this and wrote an excellent deep dive into Google’s documentation on the topic. In fact, he dug up a Reddit earnings call where Reddit’s executive team said, “it’s totally sanctioned (by Google)” to do this.
Google comments. So I reached out to Google to learn more about this since there been cases where Google in the past said using automated translation is a no-go. That being said, Google’s new statement makes it sound like in many cases, it is OK.
A Google spokesperson told us:
“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.”
More changes to Google documentation. In addition to the statement that Google both sent Glenn Gabe and myself, Glenn noted that Google changed its search documentation on managing multi-regional sites. Gabe wrote:
- “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.”
Why we care. It appears that using AI translation to produce translated pages that provide value to your users is OK with Google. But Google is not saying all AI translation is okay and they reference their scaled content abuse policy for further guidance.
Just be careful with taking shortcuts with content, ensure that users appreciate it and find value from it.
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