I run a search engine that publishes in twelve languages from one static site on Cloudflare Pages. Last week I audited its machine-readable layer — the part crawlers and answer engines read rather than humans — and found four problems.
None of them threw an error. None appeared in logs. Every page rendered perfectly. That is the whole point of this post: the multilingual layer fails in a register where nothing tells you.
1. The homepage was serving the wrong language to everyone abroad
The site's primary market speaks Hebrew, so / is Hebrew and /en/, /ar/, /de/ and nine others sit alongside it.
A middleware rule redirected visitors from one specific region to their language. Everyone else — including every English speaker on earth — landed on Hebrew.
