A new SEO poll shows that over 60% of SEOs would not use AI, in its current state, to translate their websites into multiple languages. The rest would, which might be a concern.

The poll was published on X by Peter Mindenhall. Peter asked, “SEO’s If you could translate your sites into multiple langs using AI in it’s current state – would you?” Here are the results:

#SEO‘s If you could translate your sites into multiple langs using AI in it’s current state – would you?
Feel free to comment why/why not
RT’s appreciated for reach#hreflang #websitetranslation #AI

— Peter Mindenhall (@PeterMindenhall) August 29, 2023

For over a decade, Google said machine translation is against Google’s webmaster guidelines, including the use of Google Translate. If you use Google Translate to translate content, do not let Google index that content. Matt Cutts, former Google spam fighter, published a video a year later going into that in more detail. And Gary Illyes said almost a decade later that Google does not want machine translated content in its index.

Here is Matt Cutts from 12 years ago:

Respected and super smart international SEO, Aleyda Solis posted, “There was a poll the other day asking if they should translate their content with AI. The answer is no without validation of native translators.”

There was a poll the other day asking if they should translate their content with AI. The answer is no without validation of native translators. Why? Just take a look at Gizmodo’s mentions over here about the terrible Spanish AI translations they now have after laying off staff. https://t.co/OgdtxNldg3

— Aleyda Solis 🇺🇦 (@aleyda) September 2, 2023

Glenn Gabe shared some AI translation issues (unrelated directly to this poll):

More: “The transition to AI translation has not been smooth, though. Readers posted on X, formerly Twitter, that some articles will start in Spanish and then suddenly change to English.” https://t.co/OGOOd7Q14a

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 2, 2023

John Mueller from Google replied to that on Mastodon saying, ” I don’t quite understand the AI angle — is it just automatic translations like they’ve been possible for years?”

Seems like John is equating AI translation to what we would call machine translation.

So, I guess using AI for website translation is not a good idea?

Forum discussion at X.