AI-translated pages can sink your site in Google
Reddit says its machine-translated pages are being ranked lower, and one SEO says poor AI translation can get a site hammered.
Reddit's AI-translated pages lost a lot of ranking in Google. Glenn Gabe published a three-part series documenting the rise and fall of that content, which he says covers tens of millions of URLs across many countries. He says the translations took a big hit with the May 2026 core update (a core update is a big change to how Google ranks every site) and the June spam update.
Reddit has now explained more about the drop itself. In a quote shared by Gabe, Reddit says its machine-translated content is being ranked lower, which affects its international traffic, and that the decline comes from AI Overviews and AI Mode along with the fall in AI translations.
Why this matters for a small site
Plenty of small businesses translate their site to reach customers in other countries, and the cheapest way to do that is to run every page through an AI tool and publish whatever comes out. That is the exact pattern that got hit here. Gabe's warning is blunt.
"DO NOT just translate any content via AI. Make sure it's high quality. If not, you can get hammered."
DO NOT just translate any content via AI. Make sure it's high quality. If not, you can get hammered.
The point is not that translation is banned, or that using AI to help is banned. The point is that the output has to actually be good in the target language. A page that reads like a machine wrote it, with no one checking whether it answers the question for a reader in that country, is a thin page in a new language. Publishing thousands of them at once is the kind of thing Google's spam systems look at.
What to do
If you have no translated pages, do nothing. This story does not apply to you.
If you do have them, open Google Search Console, click Performance, and filter by country to see whether clicks from your translated markets have fallen since May. Then take a handful of the translated pages and have someone who actually speaks the language read them. If the answer is that they read like machine output, fix them or remove them rather than adding more.
This is a single case, a very large one, and Reddit is not a small business. But the lesson scales down. Bulk pages that exist because a tool could make them, rather than because someone needed them, are the pages at risk. Individually written pages that answer a real question for a real reader are not what Google went after here.
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.