AI Picks a Different Brand in Spanish. Your Texas Food Brand Only Checked in English.

Reza Moaiandin, co-founder of SALT.agency, asked Claude the same six buying questions in five languages, 40 times each, on one afternoon in September. Search Engine Journal ran his write-up on October 13. For a return flight from London to Tenerife, Claude picked easyJet in 72.5 percent of the Russian answers and never once picked British Airways. Ask in Persian and British Airways won 52.5 percent of the time. Same model. Same question. The only thing that changed was the language.

FTA Global ran a bigger version of the test on ChatGPT and Gemini and called it The Context Report: 1,200 identical buying questions across 12 cities and 7 languages, every question run five times. Of the 206 brands that turned up, 159 appeared in only one country. Nearly three of the top five picks changed the moment the buyer moved away from New York and English. And the same question produced the same top brand in only 35 percent of repeated runs.

Neither study tested salsa, tortillas or sparkling water. They tested flights, hotels, headphones and business software. I wouldn't read that as a pass for food. Grocery is about as local and as language-bound as buying gets.

Texas doesn't shop in one language

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2018 to 2022 puts 28.5 percent of Texans age five and up speaking Spanish at home. That's almost 7.8 million people. In Harris County it's 35.4 percent. Dallas County, 34.4. Bexar, 34.0. Out in El Paso County it's 67.3 percent, and in Hidalgo County down in the Valley it's 80.7.

I write this from Marfa, about three hours from El Paso.

So picture a shopper in McAllen asking her phone which salsa verde to buy for enchiladas. She may well ask in Spanish. If the only AI check anybody at your brand ran was in English, from an Austin zip code, on the founder's laptop, you don't know whose jar that chatbot named. It might be yours. It might be a national brand with a translation budget. It might be a brand from Monterrey you've never heard of.

The answer moves, which means you can move it

SALT also ran two of its categories with web search turned on. The winning brand changed in seven of ten language and category combinations. Moaiandin draws the obvious conclusion. A model's training run from last year is fixed and nobody can touch it. Live search pulls in whatever got published since, so a marketing team can influence what comes back.

FTA looked the other direction and found the same pattern. In Germany, 42 percent of the sources AI cited were German web pages. Local pages in the local language shaped local answers.

Big brands are staffing for this. At Semrush Spotlight in London on October 13, Motorway's marketing and brand director Cassie Hall told the room, "We can publish new content and see it being cited within 24 hours," per Adweek. Flo Health has a manager dedicated to what it calls LLM discoverability. A small food brand doesn't need that hire. It needs the habit.

And here the small brand has the better hand. When a national salsa brand goes after Spanish-language shoppers, it hires a translation vendor and runs the English copy through legal and a committee. What comes out reads like nobody in particular wrote it. You already talk to these customers at the demo table and the farmers market. Write it down the way you say it.

I ran social for Topo Chico for 12 years. It's bottled in Monterrey, and it was popular in northern Mexico and Texas long before Coca-Cola bought it in 2017 for $220 million. If I were running a brand like that today, the first thing I'd do is ask ChatGPT and Gemini, in Spanish, where to buy agua mineral in San Antonio, and write down whose name came back.

An AI content strategy that only runs in English is built for the 64.9 percent of Texans who speak English at home. That's the part of the market your big competitors already fight over.

What to do this week

Write down ten questions a shopper asks before buying in your category, in the words a shopper would use. "Best salsa verde for enchiladas." "La mejor salsa verde para enchiladas." Not your product name. The question that comes before anybody knows your product name.

Ask each one in ChatGPT and in Gemini, in English and in Spanish, with a city in the question. Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, whatever three cities sell the most of your product. Ask each one more than once. FTA got the same top brand only 35 percent of the time, so a single answer tells you almost nothing. Log every brand that comes back in a spreadsheet.

Where you're missing in Spanish, publish in Spanish. A product page with the ingredients, the price and the stores that carry it, by city. A Spanish caption on the recipe video, written by somebody who grew up speaking it. Store names spelled the way they're spelled on the sign. If you've read why Google answers your brand name with Wikipedia, this is the same gap with a second language on top of it. The fix is the same one I laid out in how a small food brand stays the source: dated, first-hand facts on pages you own.

If your site gets enough traffic, open Bing Webmaster Tools and look at the new Topics Portfolio beta in the AI Performance report. It lists queries where other sites get cited in Bing's AI answers and yours doesn't. Bing says smaller sites may see few items or none, so don't panic if it's empty.

Run the whole test again next month, because the answers move.

Ask your food and beverage marketing agency what your brand looks like in Spanish inside ChatGPT. If nobody has checked, start there.

This is the first test I run when I start work with a food brand. If you want it run on yours, DM me.