While reviewing websites for the 2025 Web Globalization Report Card I was struck by two things:
- Deglobalization has had a visible (and negative) impact on global websites
- AI is also having an impact, though you have to look closely to see it
Combined, I believe we are in the midst of the calm before the storm.
Deglobalization is suppressing growth
Amidst the US-instigated trade wars, companies are understandably less likely to invest in global growth. The near future promises chaos and confusion, hardly the conditions to encourage going “all in” on launching additional localized websites. Also, China and Germany’s economic struggles have given many companies a harsh wake-up call in their international investments.
While global diversification remains a sound strategy for long-term growth, it also introduces risks when the largest economies grow more slowly, or retract. That said, the savvier companies have known to look beyond China and Germany and at smaller, faster-growing markets, such as Poland, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India.
Still, it’s safe to say that economic uncertainty poses acute headwinds in the year ahead. The past year did see a slight uptick in the average number of languages supported by the leading global brands. But just slightly.
The average number of languages supported by the 150 global websites studied in this report is 34. As you can see here, we’ve largely plateaued in languages — despite the fact that there remains demand around the world for many hundreds of languages.
I view this period as the calm before the storm.
That storm is AI.
AI promises a new wave of global growth
The languages industry deserves credit for pioneering AI. The earliest iterations of artificial intelligence began when computers were known as machines and the earliest form of AI was known as machine translation (MT).
The quality of MT has improved significantly over the past two decades as the technologies evolved from rules-based to statistical-based to its current AI-centric models. Google Translate now supports more than 130 languages.
What does this evolution mean for companies and end users?
It means that automated translations now look and feel more natural than anything that has come before. It means that companies can (and are) deploying AI-powered chatbots and agents to support customers across multiple languages — and customers are having positive experiences overall.
It used to be you could tell a machine-translated sentence because it was often a poorly structured sentence. Today, AI does such a good job of producing grammatically correct sentences that people now use it to clean up their own writing. And while professional translators need to be the ones managing these AI language tools, it’s become hard to ignore the massive increases in quality and efficiency we see with each passing year.
AI promises to break though “peak language”
ChatGPT supports more than 80 languages which, for many companies in this Report Card, would be an aspirational goal. Companies have resisted investing in localization due in large part to the customer support costs and challenges (such as opening international customer support centers).
But when a company can deploy an AI assistant across 50 or more languages with relatively low upfront investment, the business case for supporting 50 or more languages across all website content grows significantly more compelling.
AI will unlock going global at scale.
There remains a critical need for languages around the world. The following visual shows the number of languages supported by Wikipedia (which stands as a proxy for language demand) and the average number of languages supported by the companies in the 2025 Web Globalization Report Card.
In between the two is the only thing that is currently filling the language gap — machine translation, or automatic translation, or AI translation.
Whatever we call it, AI promises the next wave of language growth. So now is the time to develop a world-ready website architecture and a content strategy that is unbound by language. These may be uncertain times but what remains certain is the need for websites and apps that speak the world’s many languages.