Google Translate is one of the most useful tools on the internet. It’s fast, familiar, and great for helping a visitor understand a page right now.

But if your goal is more organic traffic from other languages (Spanish queries finding your site in Spanish, French queries finding your site in French, etc.), “Translate this page” solutions often don’t help much—because they typically don’t create real, indexable language pages.

This article explains the gap in a neutral way, plus what to do instead.

What “driving traffic” actually means in multilingual SEO

When people say “I want translation to drive traffic,” they usually mean:

• A user searches in another language
• Google shows a language-specific version of your page
• That user lands on that page directly from search

To make that happen, Google generally needs separate URLs for each language version, plus signals like hreflang so it can serve the right page to the right searcher. Google for Developers

Why Google Translate-style “on-the-fly” translation often doesn’t add search traffic

1) No separate URLs = nothing new for Google to rank

Many Google Translate website integrations (or browser-based translation) show translations inside the same URL. That can improve usability for visitors, but it doesn’t create new pages that Google can discover and rank per language.

Google explicitly recommends using different URLs for each language version, and notes that if you dynamically change language based on settings, Google might not find/crawl all variations.

2) Locale-adaptive / dynamic content can be missed by crawlers

If a page returns different language content based on IP, headers, or “preferred language,” Google warns that it might not crawl, index, or rank all locale variations—partly because Googlebot’s default crawling can originate from the US and it doesn’t send an Accept-Language header. Google for Developers

3) Client-side translation can run into JavaScript rendering limits

A lot of “translate on the page” approaches depend on JavaScript to rewrite the page after load. Google can render JavaScript, but it also calls out that there are differences and limitations that can prevent content on JS-powered pages from showing up in Search. Google for Developers

4) At-scale auto-translations still need “user value”

Google’s position has become more nuanced: machine translation isn’t automatically “bad,” but generating large volumes of low-value pages (including via automated translation) can fall under scaled content abuse. In other words: translation can be okay, but it needs to be genuinely helpful—not just mass-produced pages for rankings. Google for Developers+1

What to do if your goal is multilingual traffic

If you want search traffic in other languages, aim for this baseline:

• Unique, language-specific URLs (subfolders like /es/, subdomains, or ccTLDs)
• hreflang annotations so Google connects each language version correctly
• Translated titles, meta descriptions, headings, and key UI text (not just body copy)
• A visible language switcher that links to those URLs (helps users and discovery)
• Quality control so translations provide real value (avoid “scaled content abuse” patterns)

A balanced rule of thumb

• If you want to grow new organic traffic in other languages → you need indexable localized pages + international SEO signals.

Web Linguist approach

Web Linguist is designed for the “drive traffic” path: create real language versions you can control (URLs, hreflang, editing, glossary consistency, analytics), while keeping setup lightweight.