While SEO professionals continue to track Reddit’s explosive growth in organic traffic (1.5B/month according to SEMrush), a quieter shift is taking place: Google Translate’s /translate subfolder has reached 606 million monthly organic visits — over one-third of Reddit’s traffic — without traditional content strategies or backlinks.
What’s fueling this?
When high-quality content in non-English languages is scarce, Google often inserts translated versions of authoritative English pages directly into the SERP, using translate.google.com/translate links. These auto-generated translations act as proxy gateways, sending traffic through Google’s own infrastructure (translate.goog), not the originating site.
Key Points:
Traffic rerouted through Google: Users still land on the translated webpage, but the request passes through Google’s Translate proxy.
SEO implication: While site owners benefit from the exposure, Google harvests behavioral data, engagement signals, and even content performance — all from its own domains.
Unreachable via SEO tactics: Unlike Reddit or other UGC platforms, this traffic funnel cannot be directly optimized or influenced by SEOs — it’s algorithmically controlled and only triggered when localized content is missing OR unhelpful/weak. (This is also an opportunity to see which queries don’t provide native quality content in SERP)
This model turns Google Translate into a search experience layer, not just a tool — one that expands Google’s visibility and data collection deeper into multilingual web interactions.
Let me show you a weird example: Let’s search “Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu” in Turkey to see Turkish results -> google.com.tr
Even the politician has a Turkish Wikipedia page(very detailed) the Google shows the English one with “Translated” & proxied URL: https://translate.google.com/translate?u=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemal_K%25C4%25B1l%25C4%25B1%25C3%25A7daro%25C4%259Flu&hl=tr&sl=en&tl=tr&client=srp
Turkish page: https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemal_K%C4%B1l%C4%B1%C3%A7daro%C4%9Flu
WHY?
For journalists covering search and AI, this raises critical questions about neutrality, proxy visibility, and ownership of multilingual user journeys in global SERPs.