Soll_TrollQ: non-english languages-question
Hi Megan. I've seen a few questions here about non-English language support.
I'd like to understand a bit more about the future direction here.
I'm based in Sweden and work with local clients where Swedish-language SEO and geo-targeting is essential. My question is: do you see Swedish (and similar smaller EU languages) eventually reaching the same level of quality and effectiveness as English — both in terms of keyword data accuracy, topical clustering, and content brief quality — or will non-English languages always lag behind due to structural limitations like smaller search data pools and less AI training data in those languages?
In other words: is this a matter of time and prioritization on your end, or is there a fundamental ceiling for smaller languages that users should be aware of when evaluating the tool for non-English markets?
Info_TopicalMapAI
May 21, 2026A: Hi,
Thoughtful question, and the honest answer is "both, but mostly structural. "There are three layers to non-English performance, and they behave differently
1. Topical clustering quality (AI-driven): This is closing fast. Modern frontier models (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4o) handle Swedish, Greek, Italian, and similar EU languages well at the cluster-naming and topic-organization level. The structural limitation here is shrinking, the gap between English and Swedish output for "give me a topical map for X" is no longer dramatic. This will keep improving as models do, without any work on my end.2. Content brief quality: Slightly larger gap. The prompts I use are English-anchored (the system prompt itself is in English even when output is in the target language), which biases brief structure toward English-SEO conventions. Swedish briefs are useful but feel a half-step less native than English ones. This is fixable with localized prompt engineering - known work, not on my immediate roadmap but achievable.3. On accuracy, there's a real structural ceiling, and it's important to be honest about it. Search volume providers (DataForSEO/Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Semrush, SimilarWeb) all face the same physics that smaller markets = smaller datasets = lower reporting thresholds = more "no data" or imprecise volumes for long-tail queries. Swedish has roughly 10M speakers vs 1.5B for English, so the panel and clickstream sampling that feeds these tools is thinner. A long-tail Swedish phrase that "should" have 50 searches/month might fall below the reporting threshold entirely and show as null. This isn't fixable by me, it's the data physics of smaller markets.
Just shipped Ahrefs BYOK as a tier-3 fallback so when Google Keyword Planner returns null for a non-English query, the system tries Ahrefs next. Ahrefs has broader panel coverage than GKP, especially for mid-tail non-English queries. For Swedish at mid-volume, this should meaningfully improve coverage. For ultra-long-tail Swedish, the data may still not exist anywhere.
Honest UI signals - keywords with no data now show "no data" instead of fabricated placeholder numbers (I shipped a fix for that yesterday).
TMAI is genuinely useful for Swedish topical structure and clustering today. For volume data, expect more "no data" markers than you'd see in English, and cross-reference critical decisions against Google Ads Keyword Planner (with location=Sweden, language=Swedish). If you have an Ahrefs subscription, plug your API key into the BYOK settings, it'll improve coverage measurably.
For "smaller EU languages" specifically (Swedish, Greek, Polish, Czech, etc.), they'll always trail English in data density, but the gap on topical structure and AI work is narrowing rapidly. The data physics gap will persist; the AI quality gap will mostly close over the next 12-24 months as models improve. That's the honest read. Worth knowing as you evaluate the tool, you should expect to do more manual volume verification on Swedish queries than English ones, but the topical work itself is increasingly tool-agnostic across languages.
Best,
Megan