ExplainerTechnical AEO
Multilingual AI Visibility: hreflang, Translation, and Which Version Gets Cited
by the AEO GEO Labs team3 min read
A company with pages in English, German, and Japanese usually assumes that a German-language question will be answered from the German page. In practice, answer engines are inconsistent about this. Sometimes they cite the German page. Sometimes they cite the English page and translate the answer. Sometimes they cite a third-party German site because your German page was thin.
This post covers what you can control.
What hreflang does and does not do
hreflang is a set of link tags or sitemap entries that tells a crawler "this page has equivalents in these languages and regions". Search engines use it to serve the right version in results. It is well understood and worth implementing correctly: every version points to every other version and to itself, the language codes are valid, and the URLs are the canonical ones.
What hreflang does not do is tell an answer engine which version to quote. Engines retrieve pages based on the query, the language of the query, and what they find in their index. A German query tends to pull German-language sources, but if your German page says less than your English page, the English page may win on content and get translated in the answer.
The thin translation problem
The most common pattern we see in audits is a full English site and partial translations: the homepage and pricing in German, the comparison pages and documentation only in English. A German user asking "which tool is better for X" gets an answer drawn from the English comparison page or, more often, from a German competitor who wrote the comparison in German.
The fix is not more hreflang. It is deciding which pages matter for AI answers in each market and translating those fully. Comparison pages, pricing, the pages that answer "what is" and "how do I" questions. Translate the pages that get cited, not the pages that are easiest to translate.
Entity consistency across languages
Your company name, product names, and key facts should be identical across versions. Not translated, identical. If the German page calls the product "Acme Zahlungsplattform" and the English page calls it "Acme Payments", an engine may treat those as two products. Keep product names untranslated and put the translated description next to them.
Organization schema should appear on every language version with the same name, url, and sameAs values, and an inLanguage property on the page. The llms.txt file can list key pages per language, or you can publish one per subdirectory if the site is large.
Which version gets cited
Based on what we have seen, three things push an engine toward a specific language version:
- The query language matches the page language, and the page is complete.
- The page is directly reachable: not blocked, not behind geo-redirects that send a crawler elsewhere.
- Third-party sources in that language mention the company by the same name.
The third point matters more than most teams expect. If no German review site or forum mentions you, the German page is an island.
Geo-redirects break this
Automatic redirects based on IP are the single biggest technical obstacle. A crawler in the United States that is redirected from /de/ to /en/ never sees the German page. Serve every version at its own URL to everyone, use hreflang to signal the relationship, and offer a language switcher rather than forcing one.
Measuring per language
Share of answer is a per-language measurement. Run the same set of questions in English and German and record which version, if any, is cited. The gap between the two tells you where the translation work should go. In our experience the gap is usually larger than the team's assumption, because the English site has had years of attention and the German site had a launch and nothing since.
How we work on it
At AEO GEO Labs we treat each language as its own visibility problem: its own question set, its own share of answer, its own list of third-party sources to appear in. The technical foundation (hreflang, canonical URLs, no geo-redirects) is checked once; the content and source work is ongoing per market.
A first check
Pick your second-biggest market. Ask an engine, in that language, the question you most want to be the answer to. Note which page it cites and what language it is in. Then run the cited URL through the free AI crawler checker at AEO GEO Labs to confirm the page is actually reachable. If the answer came from your English page, that is your translation priority.