Google says it’s investigating issue where international search traffic is getting routed to translate proxy

Update 20/06/25 – 08:49pm (IST) : Popular SEO consultant Glenn Gabe took to X a few hours ago to confirm (via SEO Roundtable) that Google may have indeed fixed the translate bug.

Original article published on 20/06/25 follows:

Over the last month or so, many website owners and SEO professionals have been raising alarms over a Google search feature that redirects international users to a translated, Google-hosted version of websites rather than the original source.

Concerns began bubbling up on platforms like Reddit, with users reporting that when they click on a search result in a different language, they aren’t taken to the actual website. Instead, they land on a “translate proxy” page, with a URL structure like www-your-site-com.translate.goog. This means the user never actually leaves Google’s ecosystem to visit the creator’s original site. That’s borderline stealing and is now one of the many reasons why publishers and even some users are frustrated with Google’s antics.

The practice gained significant attention following a detailed report by Ahrefs earlier this month. The report highlighted how this redirection negatively impacts content creators. When traffic is funneled through Google’s proxy, the original website loses out on valuable visitor data, and traffic that should be recorded as organic search is instead misattributed as a referral from Google Translate. Of course, this can skew analytics and affect a site’s ad revenue and potential sales.

According to the Ahrefs analysis, this phenomenon seems connected to Google’s major core update in March and the broader rollout of AI Overviews across numerous countries. It appears that when Google’s AI can’t find a high-quality answer in a user’s native language, it finds a relevant English-language page, translates it on the fly, and presents it through its own proxy. This has led to frustration among creators who feel Google is essentially hijacking their traffic. The irony here is that this goes against Google’s long-standing advice for creators to avoid using auto-translated content on their own sites.

But it seems that this daylight robbery might not go on for long. In a Reddit thread where a user complained about the “hijacking” of result URLs, an official Google Help Community account responded. “Thank you for bringing this to our attention,” the Google representative wrote. “We’re aware of the issue you’ve described and want to assure you that our team is currently investigating it.”

While it’s somewhat of a relief knowing that Google is “investigating” the issue, there’s no ETA on when we can expect it to be addressed. So for the time being, website owners worried about losing their international audience can try to provide their own high-quality, native-language translations. In case you want to know more details or understand how to check if you’re affected, the Ahrefs article offers a detailed guide on that.

We’ll keep an eye out for more details and will update the article if there’s something to share. In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts on this in the comments below.