Is Auto-Redirects by IP or Browser Language on multi-language websites good or bad practice according to Google?

[krajacic]

EDIT: GPT says: This is not a good practice because Google usually crawls from the US and based on that bot might never see /fr , /de and other language pages. And might not index and rank them well.

*And that on instead I should just add switch option and that’s it.*

But I think that is not true since I’ll add sitemaps (that contains /fr and /de page) to Search Console and it should be indexed and ranked well.

What’s your practice and experiences with that?

[Ajay_Soni_]

Auto-redirects based on IP or browser language might seem helpful for users, but Google generally recommends avoiding them. The main issue is that Googlebot crawls mostly from U.S. IPs, so if you auto-redirect, it might only see one version of your site and miss your other language pages completely.

A better approach is to let users choose their language manually and use **hreflang** **tags** to help Google understand which version is for which audience. You can still show a gentle pop-up or banner suggesting the right language based on browser settings, that way, users get a good experience, and Google can index all your pages properly.