Quick answer
Language changes which brands AI assistants name, because the sources and phrasing differ. If your customers ask in Hindi or another Indian language, include those prompts in your tracking set and compare results with English, instead of assuming they match.
Key takeaways
- Answers can differ between English and Indian languages for the same question.
- Google has highlighted Hindi and other Indic language support in Search and Gemini features.
- Track prompts in each language your customers use, and compare rates side by side.
Why would language change the answer?
Assistants draw on text in the language of the question, and the pages they retrieve differ by language. Brands with strong content in English may be less visible when the same question is asked in Hindi.
What is known about Indian language support?
Google has said it is expanding Hindi and other language support in AI Mode and Search Live, and announced a live translation model covering ten Indic languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu. Anthropic has said it plans to improve Hindi and to add more Indian languages.
How to test it
- 1Write each core prompt in the languages your customers use, not by machine translation alone.
- 2Include mixed language phrasing such as Hindi words in English sentences, where that is how people write.
- 3Run each version on every platform, and compare mention rate side by side.
- 4Note where a language returns no useful answer at all.
What has not been published
Three kinds of Indian-language prompt
It is tempting to treat language as a single switch. In practice, Indian buyers write to assistants in at least three ways, and each can return different answers. The first is pure script, such as a question written entirely in Devanagari. The second is romanised, where Hindi words are typed in the Latin alphabet. The third is mixed, where English nouns sit inside a Hindi sentence, often called Hinglish. Each may be retrieved and answered differently, so a tracking set that uses only one will describe only one part of your audience.
| Form | What it tests | How to write it |
|---|---|---|
| English | The baseline | Natural phrasing a customer would use |
| Native script | Whether content in the language is retrieved and used | Written by a native speaker, not machine translated |
| Romanised | How assistants handle transliteration | As people actually type it on a phone |
| Mixed | Real conversational habits | Keep brand and product words in English where customers do |
Why native review matters
Machine translation produces grammatical text that few people would actually type. Buyers use shorter, more colloquial phrasing, regional terms and abbreviations. Having a fluent speaker review or write the prompts is what turns a language test into a realistic one.
What the evidence says about adoption
The Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report found that 18% of its Indian sample used chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini to access news weekly. It does not break the finding down by language, and we are not aware of any platform that publishes a brand-level comparison of results by Indian language. That is why your own measurement is the only reliable way to know how you appear.
Content that helps in more than one language
- Publish the pages that matter most, such as pricing, product and support, in the languages your customers use, written natively.
- Set the language attribute correctly on each page so systems can tell which language it is in.
- Keep facts such as prices, plans and locations consistent across language versions.
- Use local terms where customers use them, and keep brand names in the form customers type.
- Add the language versions to your sitemap and link them to each other so they are easy to find as a set.
How to read the results
Compare mention rate and description for each language against English on the same questions. A gap is not automatically a failure. It may simply mean that few sources exist in that language for your category, which is an opportunity to publish the definitive answer. Where a language returns no useful answer at all, note it and revisit as platforms improve.
Should I translate my whole site?
Not at first. Start with the pages that answer your buyers' most important questions in the languages your measurement shows a gap in. Broader translation can follow once you see that it moves the results.
Do assistants understand Hinglish?
Behaviour varies by platform and changes over time. That is why testing mixed-language prompts on each platform, and repeating the test, is more reliable than assuming.
Sources
- 1. Google: AI Impact Summit 2026 (18 Feb 2026)
- 2. Anthropic Economic Index: India country brief (Nov 2025 data)
- 3. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025: Executive summary (2025 edition, 48 markets)
Cite this page
BrandWater AI Research. (2026, 27 August 2026). Hindi and regional prompts: why language changes which brands appear. https://brandwaterai.in/blog/hindi-and-regional-prompts
How we work
Figures are dated and linked to their sources. Where none exist we say so. Read our methodology and AI transparency pages.