Multilingual GEO

AI Overviews launched in the United States in May 2024 and reached more than 100 countries and territories by October that year, in six languages^[3]. March 2025 added German, Italian, Polish and French alongside a set of European markets^[4]. By May 2025 Google put the total at more than 200 countries and territories and more than 40 languages, taking in Arabic, Chinese, Malay and Urdu^[1].

AI Mode ran its own schedule: the United States in March 2025, India in June, the United Kingdom in July^[5], five more languages in September^[6], then more than 35 new languages and over 40 new countries on 7 October 2025, which carried it past 200 territories^[7]. February 2026 added 53 further languages for a total of nearly 100^[2]. That batch was weighted towards lower-resource languages, among them Amharic, Hausa, Somali, Yoruba, Zulu, Kazakh, Nepali, Khmer, Faroese and Western Frisian^[8].

At the March 2025 European launch Germany received AI Overviews in German and English while Belgium received English only^[9], so users in some live markets met an English answer to a query typed in their own language. The obvious page-level signal does not close that gap. Google's documentation states that neither hreflang nor the HTML lang attribute is used to detect the language of a page, which separate algorithms determine; the tag only tells Google which localised variant to show a given user^[10].

Coverage in a product is not quality in the language. MIRACL, a standard multilingual retrieval benchmark, gathered more than 700,000 relevance judgments for around 77,000 queries over Wikipedia in 18 languages, every assessment made by a native speaker^[11]. Specialist domains fall much further. A 2026 medical retrieval benchmark measured biomedical encoders at 0.818 nDCG@10 in English and 0.056 in Japanese on the same task, and states that an English-only benchmark cannot detect a gap of that size^[12].

Frequency data outside English is thin. Ahrefs puts AI Overview appearance at roughly 12.5% to 16.5% of searches in countries where the feature has rolled out^[13]. That single range covers every rolled-out market at once and is not broken down by language. Because a country can be live while its own language is not^[9], per-country and per-language figures are not interchangeable, and the same distinction applies to local search outside English-speaking markets.