Reddit is eating your AI visibility in non-English markets with machine-translated content

Hi everyone! I joined Peec AI as a GEO Researcher at the beginning of June. This is my first research paper, and I wanted to share it with you.

I’ve been quiet for a while, focusing on more data, and I’ll be back in the coming weeks with classifiers, AI training sets, hardcore SEO, and much more. Cooking!

We analyzed 64.77 million Reddit citations across 20 countries and four AI engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, and Gemini. The data covers March 1 to June 10, 2026.

Of those citations, 3.7 million carried Reddit’s ?tl= translation parameter. That means one in every eighteen Reddit links shown to users led to a machine-translated page, not the original thread.

40% to 73% -- Share of Reddit citations on Google AI surfaces pointing to machine-translated pages, across non-English markets including Sweden, Norway, Poland, and Spain.

The mechanism is straightforward. Reddit machine-translates its English threads and publishes them at URLs with a ?tl= parameter. When an AI engine answers a question, it retrieves and cites what it surfaces. If the citation carries ?tl=, the user received a machine-translated English Reddit thread instead of local-language content.

The queries affected are not niche topics. In Germany, the translated Reddit threads that Google AI cited cover the commercial heart of the web:

The most striking category is German daily life at 16.9%. A German user asks which supermarket has the best prices. Google’s AI answer cites an English thread from r/AskGermany, where expats compare ALDI, REWE, and Lidl, served in Reddit’s machine-translated German. The question was local. The topic was local. The German-language web has covered it for decades. The citation went to Reddit anyway.

Google is the outlier. And Google is the engine non-English markets depend on most.

The same German user asking the same question can get translated English Reddit threads in Google AI Mode and the original English threads on ChatGPT. If you track AI visibility in one engine and assume the others behave the same way, the May 2026 data shows how wide that gap can get.

The language barrier that once protected local-language content in non-English AI results is functionally gone on Google. The entire English-speaking Reddit now reaches your users in their own language, translated by Reddit, cited by Google.

If you publish outside the English-speaking world, the question worth asking is: how often does translated Reddit appear next to you in AI answers, or instead of you?

Read the full research here: https://peec.ai/blog/reddit-machine-translated-pages-ai-visibility