Every large American metro contains a substantial buying population that does business in Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Tagalog, or Haitian Creole. Almost every supplier trying to sell to them publishes in English only. What follows is the size of that gap and what it costs to close.

I.  The Audience Is Already in Your Zip Code

1. Of the 316,142,560 U.S. residents aged five and over, 70,375,520 speak a language other than English at home. That is 22.3 percent, closer to one in four than one in five. (American Community Survey, 2020–2024 five-year estimates, table C16001.)
2. Of those, 27,139,643 speak English less than “very well,” which is 8.6 percent of the country and 38.6 percent of everyone who speaks a non-English language at home. Those readers will miss part of what an English page says, including the part where you explain what you charge.
3. Spanish alone accounts for 42,869,908 speakers, 17,218,782 of them below “very well.” That second number is larger than the population of every state except California, Texas, Florida, and New York.
4. The money moved with them. The Latino Donor Collaborative puts U.S. Latino GDP at $4 trillion for 2023, the fifth-largest economy on earth if you cut it loose, with $4.1 trillion in purchasing power and growth since 2015 of more than 50 percent against 17 percent for everyone else. The Selig Center tracked Hispanic buying power from $213 billion in 1990 to $2.1 trillion in 2021.
5. The preference is measured, not assumed. CSA Research surveyed 8,709 consumers across 29 countries: 76 percent prefer to buy where the information is in their own language, and 40 percent will not buy from a site in another language at all. Among respondents with no English competence, that first figure climbs to 89 percent. Closer to home, ThinkNow found 53 percent of U.S. Hispanic adults at least sometimes go looking for a Spanish-language option when they shop online.

Table 1.  Where the Market Actually Is

State	Speaks a language otherthan English at home	Speaks English lessthan “very well”	Rank by LEP share
California	44.4%	17.5%	1
New York	30.9%	13.6%	2
Texas	35.1%	13.0%	3
New Jersey	33.1%	13.0%	3
Florida	30.6%	12.5%	5
Nevada	29.5%	11.2%	6
Massachusetts	25.1%	10.0%	7
United States	22.3%	8.6%	–

U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020–2024 five-year estimates, table C16001, population age 5 and over.

II.  The Web Does Not Look Like the Country

6. W3Techs surveyed content languages on 26 August 2026 and found English is the language of 49.5 percent of every website whose language can be identified. Spanish is 6.0 percent. German 5.9. Japanese 4.9. French 4.5. Portuguese 4.1. Vietnamese 0.9.
7. Tagalog and Haitian Creole do not even get their own line. Both sit in the bucket W3Techs labels “used by less than 0.1% of the websites,” filed alongside Welsh and Esperanto. Tagalog has 1,778,009 speakers in the United States. Haitian Creole has 937,751, and in Broward County, Florida it is the home language of six percent of residents.
8. Put the two halves of Figure 1 side by side and this stops being a demographic statistic and starts being a market map. The worldwide supply of Vietnamese-language web pages is under one percent of the web, and most of it is published in Vietnam. For an orthodontist in San Jose or a tax preparer in Westminster, the count of local competitors publishing in Vietnamese rounds to zero.

Figure 1.  Ten languages, ranked by U.S. speakers, against the share of the world’s websites published in each.

III.  The Bill Is Three Dollars

9. Take your twenty most important pages. Services, pricing, financing, warranty, intake, contact, and the two or three that actually convert. Call it 1,200 words each. That is 24,000 words, roughly 146,000 characters once you count spaces and markup.
10. Google Cloud Translation’s standard neural engine lists at $20 per million characters, with the first 500,000 free every month. Amazon Translate is $15. Microsoft is $10 with a permanent two-million-character free tier. DeepL is $25 and reads best across European pairs.
11. So the machine bill for the twenty pages that make you money lands between $1.46 and $3.65, and all four options fit inside their own free tier, which makes the real figure zero. You will spend more on the coffee you drink while pasting them in.
12. The human cost is the honest one, and it is still small. One bilingual reviewer, six to eight hours, fixing machine artifacts, brand names, units, phone formats, and any wording that carries legal weight. Call it $400 to $600. Full professional human translation at $0.15 a word would run $3,600 for the same twenty pages.
13. Budget stopped being the obstacle years ago. What remains is that nobody puts it on the list.

Figure 2.  Six ways to translate the same twenty pages, on a logarithmic scale so the cheap options stay visible.

IV.  The Spanish Results Page Is a Different Planet

14. Here is the part worth the price of admission. A University of Toronto team (Chen, Wang, Chen and Koudas, arXiv 2509.08919) took 100 commercial queries across ten consumer verticals, translated them into Chinese, Japanese, German, French, and Spanish, and measured how much the set of cited sources moved.
15. Google’s cross-language domain overlap came back, in their words, “generally low (mostly between 0–0.1),” with the single strongest cell barely above 0.1. Translate the question and you get an almost entirely different set of websites. ChatGPT went further still, with overlaps near zero across the board, swapping site ecosystems wholesale by language.
16. Under non-English prompts, citations tilt toward the language of the question, though how hard depends on the engine. ChatGPT and Perplexity lean local. Claude stays notably English-heavy. Gemini sits near the middle. For Google, Japanese localized hardest, with target-language sites exceeding three-quarters of citations.
17. Translate that from research into revenue. The field competing for “reparación de techos en Filadelfia” is a different, much thinner field than the one competing for “roof repair in Philadelphia,” and in most American metros it is close to empty. That is uncontested ground, and it will not stay uncontested, because the price of entry is three dollars.
18. One caveat, and it is a real one. The same study found AI engines lean overwhelmingly on earned media, meaning independent reviews, local press, and directories, well ahead of brand-owned pages. Your Spanish page makes you retrievable. Spanish-language local coverage and reviews are what get you cited. Both matter. Only one of them costs three dollars.

Table 2.  What Happens When You Ask the Same Question in Another Language

Engine	Overlap of cited sites,English vs. translated	Language of the sitesit ends up citing	What that means for you
Google Search	Very low (0 to 0.1)	Tilts local, varies a lot by language	The Spanish results page is a near-separate contest.
ChatGPT	Near zero	Strongly local-language	It changes site ecosystems outright when you switch languages.
Perplexity	Low, similar to Google	Strongly local-language	Local-language sources are the way in.
Gemini	Low to moderate	Roughly balanced	Worth covering in both languages.
Claude	High	Stays notably English-heavy	English authority carries over. Your Spanish page alone will not move it.

Chen, Wang, Chen and Koudas, “Generative Engine Optimization: How to Dominate AI Search,” arXiv:2509.08919, September 2025. Overlap is a Jaccard index on cited-domain sets, where 1.0 would mean identical sources.

V.  What the NFL Figured Out and Your Competitor Did Not

19. First, the scale of the miss. Hispanic consumers are roughly a fifth of the U.S. population and about 11.3 percent of national buying power, yet they draw an estimated four percent of ad budgets, and under one percent of digital ad dollars reach Spanish-language properties. Samba TV clocked Hispanic households receiving 21 percent fewer ad impressions than their population share implies. Nearly every industry leaves this sitting on the table. One does not.
20. The NFL counts more than 39 million Latino fans in the United States, one of the largest Latino fan bases in American sport. Its two biggest markets abroad, Mexico at a reported 39.5 million fans and Brazil at 35.9 million, are Spanish and Portuguese. In 2026 the league plays regular-season games in Mexico City, Madrid, and Rio de Janeiro, part of a record nine international games across four continents.
21. It did not respond by translating a page. It built Mundo NFL and NFL.com/Mundo, Spanish-language club accounts, Entravision carrying roughly 51 games a season on Spanish-language radio across 29 markets, Monday Night Football on ESPN Deportes, Sunday Night Football on Telemundo, and “Por La Cultura” running all year instead of the four weeks around Hispanic Heritage Month.
22. The scoreboard: Telemundo’s Super Bowl LX broadcast averaged 3.3 million viewers, the most-watched Super Bowl in U.S. Spanish-language history, 47 percent above the previous Spanish-language record and the highest-rated non-soccer sporting event ever on Spanish-language television. The Bad Bunny halftime show peaked at 4.8 million.
23. Notice what the league never did. It did not publish a Spanish page and then route Spanish callers to an English-only line. It hired the announcers, built the shows, staffed the accounts, and kept them running in February when nobody was watching. That is the whole difference between a translated page and a translated business.

Figure 3.  The attention gap on the left. What happens when somebody closes it on the right.

VI.  Never Promise in Spanish What You Deliver Only in English

24. A translated page backed by an English-only phone line is worse than no page at all. It converts a stranger into a disappointed customer at your own expense, and it teaches a whole community that your brand wastes their time. Reputation in these markets travels by family and by church, and it travels fast.
25. In several contexts it is also illegal. The FTC amended its 1973 Enforcement Policy Statement in 1998 to make explicit that material disclosures must appear in the same language as the advertisement carrying the claim. The agency has enforced it. A Dallas Toyota dealer settled charges over full-page Spanish-language ads whose material limitations ran in fine-print English at the bottom.
26. California Civil Code §1632 requires any business that negotiates primarily in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, or Korean to hand the customer a full translation before signing. Most states have some version of this for home and telephone solicitation.
27. The federal ground moved recently in a way that gets widely misread. Executive Order 13166 was revoked in March 2025 by Executive Order 14224. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (42 U.S.C. 2000d) was untouched, Lau v. Nichols remains good law, and the language-assistance provisions of Section 1557 survived the June 2026 partial vacatur. The instruction to federal agencies changed. The underlying prohibition did not.
28. The downside is not hypothetical. A National Health Law Program review of one carrier’s closed malpractice claims found 35 in which language barriers played a part: $2,289,000 in damages and settlements plus $2,793,800 in legal fees, five deaths, and no competent interpreter used in 32 of the 35 cases.

Table 3.  The Promise Test: Read Down Before You Publish

If you publish this in Spanish…	…you have promised	…so this has to exist before you launch
A services or product page	That you can explain the work in Spanish	One person who can answer follow-up questions in Spanish
A price or financing page	That the terms are the terms	Translated terms, disclosures and fine print in Spanish, per FTC policy
A phone number	That the call will be handled in Spanish	A named bilingual staffer, or a paid interpreter line, with posted hours
A contact or quote form	That the reply arrives in Spanish	A Spanish reply template and an owner for that inbox
An intake or consent form	That the customer understood what they signed	A translated form (required outright in California under Civil Code §1632)
A chat widget	Real-time help in Spanish	Either bilingual coverage or an honest note saying English only

Every row is a commitment a reader will reasonably infer from a translated page. If the right-hand column does not exist yet, do not publish the left-hand one.

VII.  The Build Order

Table 4.  Six Weeks, Six Moves, Under $700

Week	Move	Cost	Why it is in this order
1	Pull the ACS table for your metro and pick one language	$0	Guessing which language your market speaks is how this goes wrong.
1	Line up the bilingual reviewer before translating anything	$400–$600	Without a person, everything below is a promise you cannot keep.
2	Machine-translate the 20 pages that convert	under $4	Not the whole site. The pages where money changes hands.
3	Review, fix, publish on /es/ with hreflang tags	$0	Tags tell search engines these are alternates, not duplicates.
4	Translate disclosures, forms and terms	under $2	This is the legal exposure, and it is the cheapest line item here.
5–6	Get listed and reviewed in local Spanish-language media	varies	AI engines cite earned media far more than they cite your own site.

Sequence matters more than speed. The reviewer is hired first because every step after it is a promise that depends on a person.

29. The entire program costs less than one month of the ad budget you already spend chasing people who were going to find you anyway. The only genuinely expensive part is the promise, and the promise is the one part you cannot fake.
30. Somebody in your market is going to read this and spend the three dollars. The question worth asking at your next meeting is whether it is going to be you or the shop across town.

Sources

U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020–2024 five-year estimates, tables B16001 and C16001. · W3Techs, Usage Statistics of Content Languages for Websites, 26 August 2026. · Chen, Wang, Chen and Koudas, “Generative Engine Optimization: How to Dominate AI Search,” arXiv:2509.08919, September 2025. · CSA Research, “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy – B2C,” July 2020 (8,709 consumers, 29 countries, fielded with Kantar). · Latino Donor Collaborative, 2025 Official LDC U.S. Latino GDP Report, Part One. · Selig Center for Economic Growth, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, Multicultural Economy Report. · ThinkNow Research, March 2025, via EMARKETER. · Published list pricing for Google Cloud Translation, Amazon Translate, Microsoft Azure Translator and DeepL, mid-2026. · NFL Football Operations and NFL Media releases on Por La Cultura, the Global Markets Program and the 2026 international schedule. · Nielsen figures for Super Bowl LX reported by the NFL and Telemundo; earlier Spanish-language Super Bowl audiences via Portada. · Entravision NFL Spanish-language radio release. · Federal Trade Commission, amended Enforcement Policy Statement on foreign language advertising, June 1998, and the Cowboy Toyota settlement. · California Civil Code §§1632 and 1632.5. · Executive Order 14224 (90 FR 11363); Title VI, 42 U.S.C. 2000d; Lau v. Nichols, 414 U.S. 563 (1974); Section 1557 partial vacatur, 91 FR 32887. · Quan and Lynch, “The High Costs of Language Barriers in Medical Malpractice,” National Health Law Program with UC Berkeley School of Public Health.