AI answers for local queries in non-english markets feel way behind, opportunity to explore?
been testing this for businesses in indonesia and honestly the gap is wild
same query in english vs bahasa indonesia on perplexity/grok/chatgpt and other ai providers, english gets a confident answer with specific businesses named, bahasa version is vague or just wrong. even for businesses that have good sites and reviews.
my guess is its purely a data density problem. the training corpus just has way fewer indonesian local mentions, so the model doesnt have enough corroborating signals to confidently cite anyone. like it needs to see a business mentioned across enough sources before it'll commit to putting it in an answer.
so for non-english local markets, basic stuff like getting listed on local directories (not just the global ones) probably matters more than anyone's talking about. not because google cares, but because it adds to the pool of mentions an llm might have seen.
in my very humble opinion, if we can rank higher on ai answers, it can be beneficial for our business growth/visibility. is anyone actually working on geo for non-english markets or is everyone still focused on EN content? would love to dig deeper insights!