AI translations + crawler indexing = any SEO payoff?

General
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Weighing up AI Translation (discourse-ai) on a multilingual community, also for the SEO upside. With content_localization_enabled + content_localization_crawler_param on, each translation becomes a crawlable ?tl=<locale> URL, so in theory, more searchable content per topic.

For anyone who’s actually turned it on:

  1. Did organic search traffic move, and how long before you saw it?
  2. Did Google index the ?tl= variants cleanly, or any duplicate content issues appeared?
  3. Worth the translation spend?
  4. Any caviats?

Even quick “worth it / don’t bother” welcome. Thanks!

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Hey there, great questions. Good thing I wrote a blog post about the experience - please have a read. I believe it would answer a lot of your questions

Another thing, there’s a small footgun I am going to fix this week - if you’re turning on the feature, besides enabling the settings listed above, please also enable set locale from param.

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