BERT expands to 70+ languages

What changed

Six weeks after the English launch, Google announced that BERT was being applied to searches in over seventy languages, making it a global ranking component. The rollout used a single multilingual model, and Google said improvements learned in one language transferred to others. Non-English markets recorded ranking movement in the same period.

Timing

Rollout began 9 December 2019. No completion date was announced. Rankings typically remain unstable for the whole rollout window, so measurements taken inside it are not a reliable read on the outcome.

What it affected