Our translation system said 100% — customers still saw English. Measuring by visible rendered text with A/B/C source buckets found the real hole: one unknown source was 63.9% of a page's 29,718 visible characters.
126 blog articles × 6 languages — the bill most stores fear. We ran it through an LLM translation pipeline in two batches for about $12: chunked, scored, audited, and rollback-ready.
Browser-side translation swaps text for humans but not for Google. Why server-side translations, SEO-safe URLs and quality-controlled copy make translated stores actually rank.
Most Shopify stores have content locked in theme templates and hardcoded strings that standard translation apps never touch. How to find and translate it safely.