You Are Entering a New Country or Language

Being known at home does not make you known abroad. When someone in Munich types “beste Projektmanagement-Software für Agenturen” or someone in São Paulo asks for “melhor tênis de corrida para pisada pronada”, engines that search the web tend to read pages in that language and market. If your coverage is all in English, or all about your home country, there is little for them to find, and local brands fill the answer.

What AI likely says about you today

Run the same buyer questions in the new language and, where possible, from the new country. You will typically see one of these:

• Local competitors only. The answer names brands you have never heard of, because local publications write about them.
• You, described for the wrong market. The engine knows you, but says you are “a US company” without local availability, delivery, support or a local partner.
• Translation drift. Your product is described with an awkward literal translation of your category, which does not match what local buyers type.

Also test in English from the new market, because many buyers mix languages. A Dutch IT buyer may ask in English; a Dutch shopper usually asks in Dutch. Our AI visibility self-check takes a market or city as an input, so you can build a separate prompt set for each market. It writes the prompts in English, so translate them with a native speaker before you run them.

What the engines look for

Google’s AI features are now nearly everywhere. AI Overviews are available in more than 200 countries and territories and more than 40 languages, and AI Mode added more than 35 new languages in October 2025. That reach means your new buyers can already get AI answers in their own language, built from whatever pages exist in it.

Three things help engines connect you to a new market:

Local-language pages on your own site, set up correctly. Google lets you declare language versions with HTML tags, HTTP headers or a sitemap, and treats the three methods the same. Each version must list itself and the others. Google also says it does not use hreflang to detect what language a page is in; it reads the text. So the translation itself has to be real, not a thin machine pass.

Independent local sources. Local trade press, marketplaces, review sites and forums in that language. These tend to be the pages that rank for local prompts and get cited. For a prompt like “najlepsze oprogramowanie do zarządzania magazynem”, a mention in a Polish logistics magazine is likely to count for more than English coverage.

Local facts. Where you sell, ship or have staff in that country; a local address or partner; local customer support hours. If you have a physical location customers can visit, a Google Business Profile there becomes a key local source.

A worked illustration: suppose a Finnish outdoor clothing brand, well covered in Nordic media, expands to Germany. German shoppers ask in German, the engines read German retailers, outdoor magazines and forums, and the brand’s Finnish press barely counts for those prompts. The useful moves are a properly translated German site, German marketplace listings with the same product facts, and mentions in German outdoor publications that describe the brand with the category words German buyers use.

Three risks specific to this situation

1. Your name means something else. A brand name can be a common word, a rude word or a competitor’s name in another language. With little local data, engines may describe the common meaning instead of you. Test the bare name and the name plus category in the local language before launch.

2. Disclosure rules you did not know about. Paid placements must be labeled the way each market requires. The UK advertising code says advertorials must be made clear, for example by heading them “advertisement feature”. Across the EU, paid editorial content that is not clearly identified as paid is always an unfair commercial practice. Our guide to paid mention rules covers the main regimes. This is not legal advice; check with a local adviser.

3. Errors that travel across languages. A European Broadcasting Union study across 14 languages found 45% of AI answers about news had at least one significant issue, and the problem was consistent across languages. In a new market you have less coverage to correct mistakes, so wrong facts about availability or features can stick. Publish accurate local facts early.

What to do this month

1. Write 15 buyer prompts in the local language with a native speaker, using the terms buyers actually type. Run them in each engine three times.
2. List the local sites that get cited. That is your local source map.
3. Localize your category wording and brand facts, and publish them on your site with correct hreflang.
4. Set up local profiles where they apply: marketplaces, review platforms, a Business Profile if you have a location.
5. Check each target market’s disclosure rules before any paid placement.
6. Get local-language mentions live on independent publications in that market, in context with your category and use case.

Your options

• Do it yourself. Workable with a native-speaking team member and patience; local outreach takes time.
• Local digital PR. A local agency knows the press, but you may need one per market.
• Brand mentions. Placed in context in the local language, across a large private network of real, indexed publications in many countries and languages. First mentions typically go live within 30 minutes of kickoff. Pickup by AI varies by engine and market and is measured before and after.
• Wait. Local competitors keep the local prompts while you build slowly.

Pacing and source mix across markets are covered in our brand mention strategy guide. If the new market already has one dominant player in AI answers, see what to do when a competitor owns the AI answers.

What to do next

• Build a local-language prompt set with a native speaker and record a baseline.
• Localize your category wording and brand facts before any outreach.
• Get a free AI visibility check for your new market, in the language your buyers use.
• In markets where ChatGPT already names you, growing how consistently and how high it recommends you is the focus of The Blue Ocean GPT.