Your Spanish-Speaking Customers May Land on Your English Page

A contractor who builds a real Spanish website usually pictures one path: a Spanish-speaking homeowner searches in Spanish and lands on the Spanish page. For customers who arrive through some AI assistants, the path ended somewhere else in at least one careful test: the assistant replied in the customer’s language and linked the English version of the page.

That’s what the search consultant Glenn Gabe kept seeing last December, when he tested how Google, Bing and five AI assistants handle pages published in several languages. In his French test, ChatGPT and Perplexity both answered in French and linked the English page. In his Spanish test, Perplexity and Claude linked only the English version.¹ Gabe wasn’t testing contractor sites, and his test has limits we’ll come to. But it points at a job most Spanish websites are never designed for: the English page has to work for the Spanish-speaking visitor too.

What the English page owes a Spanish-speaking visitor

This section is our interpretation, not something Gabe tested. If some share of Spanish-speaking customers will arrive on English pages, those pages can’t assume an English reader. Three things follow.

Spanish has to be visible at the top of every page

A small language menu in the footer works for someone who already knows it’s there. A visitor sent from an assistant arrives on a page about water heater repair, in English, with no reason to scroll to the bottom looking for one. A plain “Español” link near the top of the page, leading to the matching Spanish page rather than the Spanish homepage, gets them there in one tap.

Say plainly how a Spanish speaker can reach you

A visitor who can’t read the page can still recognize a phone number. What the page should say next depends on what the business can actually deliver. If someone on the team takes calls in Spanish, a contact line that says so in Spanish, such as “Hablamos español”, tells the caller a call won’t be wasted. If nobody does, the page shouldn’t suggest otherwise. A Spanish link to the Spanish contact details, or a note on when a Spanish speaker is available, is honest and still helps.

Both versions have to say the same thing

In Gabe’s Spanish test, ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode cited the English and Spanish pages together in one answer.¹ If the English page lists a town you’ve just started serving and the Spanish page doesn’t, an assistant can hand a customer both versions at once, and the two will disagree.

Which tools picked the right language

Gabe’s three worked examples were Google’s search documentation in French and in Italian, and a Cloudflare blog post in Spanish, all published with hreflang tags. Those are the tags a multilingual page uses to say “this is the Spanish version of that English page”. He changed each tool’s language setting to match wherever it allowed, and says he saw “very similar results” on sites in finance, media, press releases and obituaries.¹

Source: Glenn Gabe, GSQi, December 1, 2025.¹ Google’s AI Overviews linked the English page in one test, which Gabe called an anomaly, linked the right page in another, and didn’t appear in the third.

In those December tests, Google, Bing and the assistants built on them did best. Copilot uses Bing’s systems, and Gemini and AI Mode use Google’s. Both search engines read hreflang, though Gabe notes it’s a weaker signal for Bing, and both have handled multilingual sites for decades. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude did much worse. Gabe’s guess, and he calls it a guess, is that they don’t use hreflang at all.¹

That leaves a contractor with two halves of the problem. For Google, Bing and the assistants built on them, the Spanish page most likely has to exist as a separate page with its own address and hreflang tags to be chosen. A translate button gives them nothing to choose, which is the argument of our earlier piece, a translate button is not a Spanish website. For the other assistants, even a well-built Spanish page may lose the click to its English twin. That’s why the English page has work to do.

Where the test stops

This is one experienced practitioner’s hands-on test, not a study with a sample. Gabe says himself that testing languages across AI platforms “is not a perfect science”, that results change often, and that he expects the tools to improve. Only one of his three worked examples was in Spanish. The test is ten months old, which is a long time for these products. We looked for a newer independent test and didn’t find one, either confirming or contradicting it. So treat the table as what these tools did in December 2025, not as a verified description of how they behave today.

There’s a bigger gap for contractors. Gabe asked questions about a specific page, such as how to build a sitemap or what caused a particular outage. A homeowner asks for a provider, something like “plomero cerca de mí”, and an assistant may answer that with a business listing or a map rather than a link to a page. Nobody in this test searched that way. Applying the results to contractor searches is our inference. It’s a reasonable one whenever an assistant answers with a link to a page, but nobody has tested it.

Test it the way a customer would

Gabe’s advice to site owners is to check what the tools their customers use actually return. For a contractor, that means asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot in Spanish the way a customer would, naming the service and the town. Several tools in his test gave no links until he asked for sources, so ask for them. Then see which of your pages each one links to: the Spanish one, the English one, or none.

A Rule & Form Spanish website handles the half of this that belongs to the site’s structure. Every page gets its own Spanish address and tells Google which English page it matches. Both languages are built from the same business details, so changing your hours or adding a service updates the Spanish site too, once you approve the update. The other half belongs to the assistants. Until there’s evidence they read language signals as well as Google and Bing did in this test, a contractor’s English pages are part of its Spanish website.

Sources

1. Glenn Gabe, “AI Search, hreflang, and translated content. How do ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude handle multilingual queries?”, GSQi, December 1, 2025. A hands-on test of Google, Bing, AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Gemini on pages published in French, Italian and Spanish with hreflang. Gabe is an independent search consultant. Read via the Internet Archive’s March 2026 snapshot, because the site refuses automated requests.