Our aim
You are probably aware that websites in Catalan have become less present in search engine results over recent months in favour of the versions of the same content in other languages, even if the user has Catalan set as a preference in their browsing environment.
This was first observed in 2022, but the precise date was not ascertained. The reason for this is unknown, despite the many different informal enquiries made to the search engine companies by interested individuals and companies.
The main organisations promoting and defending the Catalan language have therefore joined forces to allocate technical resources, knowledge and mobilisation capacity to diagnose the problem and help reverse it.
Governments
The Generalitat de Catalunya (Regional Government of Catalonia) has been actively involved and has entrusted our alliance with the creation of a device that quantifies the current loss of visibility of Catalan in web searches with regard to the previous situation as well as with the task of asking the digital companies for solutions to this, hence being able to detect similar incidents in the future.
Fundació .cat with the support of the other organisations, has agreed to draw up an initial report of the situation based on objective traffic data from search engines on a great many websites offering content in Catalan and in other languages.