Is machine translation good enough for GEO?

Not on its own. Machine translation reads fluently but carries the structure and word choices of the source language, and answer engines cite it less. In a PROEMA test on 100 Dutch-language prompts, a natively written FAQ was cited about three times as often as its machine translation. At most, use translation as a draft that a native writer rewrites.

What machine translation leaves behind

Machine translation in 2026, whether from DeepL or a general-purpose model such as GPT or Claude, is fluent. What it keeps is the source language underneath: sentence patterns no native writer would choose, word choices that are correct but literal, idioms flattened into neutral phrasing. A native reader notices within a paragraph. PROEMA's reading is that answer engines notice too, and that a page which reads as translated is a weaker candidate for citation than one written for its audience.

What PROEMA measured

In April 2026, PROEMA compared two Dutch versions of the same FAQ on expertcafe.be, a site it runs in five native languages: one translated from French with DeepL, one written by a native Dutch speaker. Across 100 Dutch-language prompts on Perplexity, the translated version was cited 6 times and the native version 19 times. "On multilingual content, our rule has become strict: one native author per language, never pure translation," stresses Lorenzo Eeman, founder of PROEMA.

When translation can still serve as a base

Volume changes the calculation. For a catalogue of several hundred FAQ entries, writing every language from scratch is rarely realistic, and a machine draft can serve as the starting point. The condition is that the native writer rewrites it instead of correcting it: fixing errors leaves the source structure in place, rewriting removes it. PROEMA's content service works that way, with a native writer for French, Dutch and English.

Belgian French and Flemish are markets of their own

The same logic holds between variants of one language. French written for France is not French written for Belgium, and Dutch from the Netherlands is not Flemish. French-speaking Belgians count septante and nonante and call their mobile a GSM. In Flanders, a small business is a kmo, not an mkb. A page in the wrong variant reads as foreign to the very audience it targets. On the technical side, each language version should point to its siblings with reciprocal hreflang tags: when the return link is missing, Google ignores the annotation.