# Jorge Horst — International SEO & AI Search Visibility Consultant > Independent consultant helping brands that sell in more than one country get found in Google and in AI answers. International SEO strategy, technical and content audits, AI-driven link acquisition, and the automations that make it run. Nine markets, healthcare and regulated categories. Jorge Horst is an SEO consultant who works on multi-market and multilingual search visibility. He is Senior SEO Specialist at ALK-Abelló, where he runs SEO across 21 web properties in nine countries — consumer health portals, professional healthcare platforms and regulated brand sites, from 37 to 3,100 URLs, with technical audits running weekly on all of them. He consults independently for companies outside that conflict. Native Spanish, professional English. Works remotely across European and American time zones, operating from Poland. ## Key facts - **Role:** International SEO and AI search visibility consultant - **Day job:** Senior SEO Specialist, ALK-Abelló - **Languages:** Spanish (native), English (professional) - **Markets:** Nine countries across Europe and North America - **Scale:** 21 web properties under weekly technical monitoring - **Specialism:** Multi-market and multilingual SEO in healthcare and regulated categories - **Education:** System Analyst, Information Technology, Blaise Pascal Institute - **Contact:** hi@jorgehorst.com ## Services - [International SEO consulting](https://jorgehorst.com/services/international-seo/): International architecture (subfolder vs subdomain vs country domain), hreflang audits and implementation, content parity across languages, per-market keyword and intent mapping, and market-entry sprints. - [SEO & AI visibility audit](https://jorgehorst.com/services/seo-ai-visibility-audit/): A productised audit in five modules — technical crawl, content and intent by market, an AI-answer visibility module run against six engines, link profile, and a prioritised 90-day roadmap. Tier 1 covers one market and up to 500 URLs; Tier 2 covers two or more markets, including hreflang and international architecture. - [Link building & digital PR](https://jorgehorst.com/services/link-building/): Four to six earned editorial placements a month on domains with real organic traffic. Every target justified in writing before outreach. No private blog networks, link farms or paid placements disguised as editorial. - [SEO automation](https://jorgehorst.com/services/seo-automation/): Fixed-price workflow builds in n8n or Make — weekly technical health monitoring, Search Console decay detection, localisation brief generation, link prospecting pipelines, and AI-citation tracking. - [All services](https://jorgehorst.com/services/): The full ladder, including advisory retainers of four or eight hours a month, a sixteen-hour-a-month fractional SEO lead, and half-day team workshops. Prices are not published: each engagement is quoted with a fixed scope and a fixed price before work starts. ## Answers to common questions - **What does an international SEO consultant do?** Three things domestic SEO does not cover: deciding international architecture, making hreflang and canonicals agree with each other, and mapping search intent separately per market rather than translating keywords. - **What is an AI visibility audit?** A measurement of whether AI answer engines cite you, run with a prompt set of 50 to 100 buyer-intent prompts per market against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini and Copilot. It records who gets cited, where the client is absent, and which third-party sources the engines rely on. - **What does a quality backlink cost in 2026?** The market rate for a genuinely useful editorial link is 370 to 510 USD; a digital-PR placement in a publication with real editorial standards runs 1,250 to 1,500 USD. - **What is the most common hreflang mistake?** Missing return tags. Hreflang is a mutual declaration — if one page points to another and the other does not point back, Google discards the pairing entirely. - **Is en-UK a valid hreflang value?** No. The ISO 3166-1 country code for the United Kingdom is GB, so the correct value is en-GB. UK is only reserved in the standard, and Google's documentation says it ignores reserved codes such as UK in hreflang, so en-UK does not target the United Kingdom. A free generator that catches this is at https://jorgehorst.com/tools/hreflang-generator/. - **Does he guarantee rankings?** No. He commits to the work — the analysis, the deliverables and the hours — never to a position, a traffic number or a revenue figure. ## Who he does not work with Jorge Horst does not accept clients in allergy immunotherapy, companies competing with ALK-Abelló, or agencies and vendors serving ALK-Abelló. This exclusion exists because of his employment and is written into his terms of service. Consulting work happens outside working hours, and client data, tooling and accounts are kept entirely separate from his employer's. ## Notes Working notes published at https://jorgehorst.com/notes/, roughly one substantial piece a month. - [Multilingual SEO: how to run one site in several languages](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/multilingual-seo/): The five decisions behind a multilingual site — one URL per language, hreflang, letting people choose rather than redirecting them, translating content rather than templates, and researching each language — with Google's guidance on each: it determines language from visible content rather than lang attributes, advises against automatic redirects between language versions, and crawls without an Accept-Language header, mostly from US IP addresses. Includes a check of 110 international brands' home pages on 27 September 2026 from Kraków: of 72 usable, 48.6% adapted to language or location (29.2% by IP, 18.1% redirected by browser language, 4.2% switched language at the same URL); all 21 IP-routed sites left their German pages reachable when requested directly; Zoom and Spotify redirect their German pages for visitors without German browser settings but serve them to Googlebot's user agent; one of 72 sent Vary: Accept-Language. Published 27 September 2026. - [International link building: why links cost less in smaller markets](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/international-link-building/): Google lists links from other local sites among the signals for which country a page targets. Compares the median referring domains to top-10 pages for the same commercial queries in four markets (Ahrefs, 27 September 2026): running shoes US 111, Germany 8, Spain 4.5, Poland 6; project management software US 359, Germany 24, Spain 6.5, Poland 2 — while the ranking domains' Domain Rating stayed high in every market. Covers where local links come from, what does not travel, Google's link spam policy on paid links, and how to split a link budget by market. Published 27 September 2026. - [SEO localisation vs translation: what changes by market](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/seo-localisation/): Translation changes the words, localisation changes the query, page type, commercial details and trust signals. Example from 27 September 2026: in Germany Siebträgermaschine gets 82,000 searches a month against 14,000 for the literal Espressomaschine; in Poland ekspres kolbowy 20,000 against 450 for ekspres do espresso; Spain splits demand across three spellings; and the page types ranking differ by market (test and price comparison sites in Germany, product pages in Spain, the marketplace Allegro in Poland). Cites CSA Research's 2020 survey of 8,709 consumers in 29 countries: 76% prefer to buy with information in their own language, 40% never buy from sites in other languages. Published 27 September 2026. - [How to appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/how-to-appear-in-chatgpt/): Each AI engine runs separate crawlers for its search index, for live fetches a user asked for, and for training, and blocking the wrong one has different consequences. OpenAI states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, while blocking GPTBot only withholds training data; Anthropic documents the same split across Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User and ClaudeBot; Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode need no special optimisation and run on Googlebot, with Google-Extended covering other systems and the Search Console generative AI control, worldwide since 31 August 2026, covering the features themselves. Includes a check of robots.txt and llms.txt on 230 brand, SaaS and publisher sites on 21 September 2026: of 168 readable files, 70% name no AI crawler, 19.6% block a training crawler, 13.7% block an AI search crawler, none block Googlebot, all ten sites blocking OAI-SearchBot are news publishers, and 25.7% of the 230 serve a real llms.txt. The Spanish version is at https://jorgehorst.com/es/notas/como-aparecer-en-chatgpt/. Published 21 September 2026. - [hreflang tags: a practical guide, and the mistakes that break them](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/hreflang-guide/): How hreflang works according to Google's documentation: the three implementation methods (HTML head, HTTP Link header, XML sitemap), the rules a set must follow, return tags evaluated pair by pair, why every version should be its own canonical and why Google prefers URLs in hreflang clusters when choosing canonicals, codes that look valid but are not (en-UK, es-419, es-LA), error rates from Ahrefs (67% of 374,756 domains with at least one issue) and SALT.agency, and a check of 50 international brand home page sets on 16 September 2026 in which 18 had at least one problem, such as permanent redirects, missing return tags or codes written country first. Includes an audit method and eleven mistakes with fixes. The Spanish version is at https://jorgehorst.com/es/notas/hreflang-guia-practica/. Published 16 September 2026. - [AI Overview tracking: what you can measure in 2026](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/ai-overview-tracking/): What Google Search Console reports for AI Overviews and AI Mode. The generative AI performance report, available to every site by 31 August 2026, shows impressions by page, country, device and date, but no clicks, no queries and no split between the two features. Covers Google's counting rules, independent click-through evidence from Pew Research Center and Ahrefs, the limits of rank trackers, referrer bugs in analytics, and a monthly tracking routine for multi-market sites. Published 15 September 2026. - [International keyword research: don't translate, research](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/international-keyword-research/): Why a translated keyword list fails in a new market, with Ahrefs search volumes for car rental terms in the US, the UK, Spain, Mexico and Germany in September 2026 (alquiler de coches: about 26,000 a month in Spain, 200 in Mexico), what Keyword Planner, Google Trends and third-party tools can and cannot compare across countries, and a five-step process for researching each market. Published 15 September 2026. - [hreflang x-default: what it does and when to use it](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/hreflang-x-default/): What x-default tells Google according to its documentation and the 2013 announcement, the language selector case it was designed for, where to point it, the mistakes that break it, and a check of 60 international brand home pages on 15 September 2026: of 19 readable home pages with hreflang, 11 pointed x-default at English, 2 at a global page or root domain, and 6 had none. Published 15 September 2026. - [llms.txt in 2026: what it does and what it doesn't](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/llms-txt/): What llms.txt is and what server-log evidence shows about it. Ahrefs found 97% of 38,360 published llms.txt files received no requests in May 2026, and Google's generative AI guide says Google Search does not use the file, with a note added on 15 June 2026 that it neither helps nor harms visibility or rankings there. Argues for treating it as a cheap fact sheet rather than a visibility tactic, and for checking robots.txt access for crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot first. Published 14 September 2026, updated 15 September 2026. - [Subfolder, subdomain or country domain](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/subfolder-subdomain-cctld/): Google's own pros and cons for ccTLDs, subdomains, subdirectories and URL parameters, the removal of Search Console country targeting in 2022, the costs Google's table omits, and a decision rule that defaults to subfolders. Published 14 September 2026. - [The international SEO audit checklist](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/international-seo-audit-checklist/): Thirty-eight checks for auditing a multi-market site, covering architecture, hreflang, content parity, per-market intent, geotargeting and measurement, in the order they should be run. Published 11 September 2026. - [Healthcare SEO across countries](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/healthcare-seo-across-countries/): What changes when health content crosses a border — YMYL scrutiny, medical review as a scheduling constraint, claims and approved indications that differ by market, and making E-E-A-T machine-readable. Published 11 September 2026. - [Entering the German market with SEO](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/entering-the-german-market/): Why Germany is the most underestimated first EU market — the local competitive set, compound nouns that break translated keyword research, the trust signals German buyers expect, and the Impressum that German law requires of commercial sites. Published 11 September 2026. - [Answer engine optimisation for multi-market brands](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/answer-engine-optimisation/): Ranking first does not mean being cited. How AI answer engines choose sources, why they answer the same question differently in every language, and why the smallest market is the one to win first. Published 11 September 2026. - [Fractional SEO lead: when it beats an agency](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/fractional-seo-lead/): What the role covers, how the cost compares with an agency retainer and an in-house hire, and the three situations where a fractional lead is the wrong answer. Published 11 September 2026. - [Content parity: the international SEO problem nobody measures](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/content-parity/): Why a second market underperforms when the technical audit is clean, a five-dimension matrix for measuring content parity across markets, and why the fix is rarely more translation. Published 11 September 2026. - [How to brief a translator so the page actually ranks](https://jorgehorst.com/notes/briefing-a-translator-for-seo/): The eight things a translator cannot know from a source page, a working SEO localisation brief template, and who reviews what. Published 11 September 2026. ## Free tools Tools at https://jorgehorst.com/tools/. No sign-up and no email gate. Each tool records one row of how it was used (the tool, the date and hour, the page language, and derived choices such as which codes, crawlers, markets or presets, and how many keywords or pages), plus the host checked by the hreflang checker and the robots.txt tester and the question asked of the AI visibility checker. Keyword lists, Search Console exports, revenue figures and page contents are not recorded, and a row holds no IP address, user agent or visitor identifier. A Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal stops the recording. All eight have a Spanish version at https://jorgehorst.com/es/herramientas/, paired with hreflang; one script per tool serves both languages. The hreflang generator, robots.txt generator, local SERP checker and both calculators run entirely client-side; the hreflang checker sends the URL entered to the site's own server so it can fetch the pages; the robots.txt tester, for a live site, sends the address to the site's server, which fetches only that host's /robots.txt and returns its rule lines; the AI visibility checker sends only the question to the site's server, which asks the AI engines, and matches brand and competitor names in the browser. - [hreflang generator](https://jorgehorst.com/tools/hreflang-generator/): Builds a complete, self-referencing set of hreflang annotations and outputs it as HTML head link tags, an HTTP Link header, or an XML sitemap. Validates every language code against the full ISO 639-1 list and every country code against ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, so en-UK is rejected (the code for the United Kingdom is GB). It also flags codes that are valid but usually a mistake: uk is Ukrainian rather than the United Kingdom, eu is Basque rather than Europe, es-LA is Spanish in Laos rather than Latin America, and ar-ME is Arabic in Montenegro rather than the Middle East. - [hreflang checker](https://jorgehorst.com/tools/hreflang-checker/): Takes one URL, fetches it and every alternate it declares (and alternates those declare, up to 25 pages), and checks the set the way Google reads it: return tags between every pair, self-references, fully-qualified URLs, valid ISO codes, duplicate codes, x-default, redirects, canonical conflicts and noindex pages. Draws a return-tag matrix in which a one-way pair appears as an asymmetric cell. Treats pages that answer with a bot check as unknown rather than broken. The URL is sent to the site's server to be fetched; the host checked is recorded, the page contents never are. - [AI visibility checker](https://jorgehorst.com/tools/ai-visibility-checker/): Sends one buyer question to Claude, OpenAI and Perplexity through their APIs with each engine's own live web search switched on and no added instructions, and streams back each answer with its citations, the pages it read and the searches it ran. In the browser it then shows whether each answer names a brand (how often and how early), whether it cites the brand's site or read it without citing it, the order in which up to five competitors are named, and which domains are cited across all answers. Gemini is not included because Google's terms for search-grounded Gemini answers forbid analysing them. API answers differ from what the consumer apps show, and a single question is a sample rather than a measurement. Free, with a small daily limit per visitor. - [robots.txt tester](https://jorgehorst.com/tools/robots-txt-tester/): Tests a live or pasted robots.txt against 28 crawlers in four groups: search engines (Googlebot, Bingbot, Applebot and others), AI search (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and others), AI training (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, CCBot and others) and user-triggered fetchers (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User and others). Applies Google's matching rules: one group per crawler with the * group ignored when a group names it, longest matching rule wins with allow winning ties, * and $ wildcards, 500 KiB limit. Models documented fallbacks (Applebot and Googlebot-Image follow Googlebot's group; AdsBot ignores *), names the deciding rule and line, flags named groups that skip the shared rules and fetchers whose owners say robots.txt may not apply, and explains HTTP statuses the way Google handles them. - [robots.txt generator](https://jorgehorst.com/tools/robots-txt-generator/): Builds a robots.txt from crawler choices, shared path rules and sitemaps, with presets to block AI training while staying in search and AI search, to block all AI crawlers, or to block everything (naming AdsBot, which ignores *). Blocked crawlers get their own group; crawlers that would inherit a block through a fallback get their own group with the shared rules. Checks the generated file crawler by crawler with the tester's engine and states the visibility cost of each block, such as leaving ChatGPT search when OAI-SearchBot is blocked. - [Local SERP checker](https://jorgehorst.com/tools/local-serp-checker/): Builds Google search links for up to 20 keywords across up to 12 markets, each with a country (gl), an interface language (hl) and optionally a city encoded as uule from Google's canonical location names. Uses google.com because Google redirects its country-code domains there since 2025. Presets for English-speaking, Spanish-speaking, DACH, Nordic and large European markets. The links open Google directly; the site records only which countries and languages were picked and how many keywords there were, never the keywords. - [SEO forecast calculator](https://jorgehorst.com/tools/seo-forecast-calculator/): Forecasts monthly organic clicks from pasted keywords with volume, current and target position, market and AI Overview presence: volume × CTR at position × (1 − AI Overview loss), ramped along an S-curve. The default CTR curve is First Page Sage's meta-analysis (position 1 39.8%, position 10 1.6%) and can be rebuilt from a Search Console queries export; the AI Overview loss defaults to Ahrefs' measured 58% for position 1 and is editable. Reports totals by market and keyword, and hands the result to the ROI calculator. - [SEO ROI calculator](https://jorgehorst.com/tools/seo-roi-calculator/): Models an SEO investment over 12 to 36 months using an S-curve ramp with an adjustable lag before results begin, and applies gross margin so the output is profit rather than revenue. Reports net return, ROI, the payback month and a month-by-month breakdown, and will state plainly when the investment does not pay back within the period. ## Versión en español El sitio tiene una sección completa en español en https://jorgehorst.com/es/, emparejada con hreflang a las páginas equivalentes en inglés. Atiende a España, América Latina y el mercado hispano de Estados Unidos con una sola sección, no con sitios por país. - [Inicio](https://jorgehorst.com/es/): posicionamiento, servicios y puntos de partida. - [Servicios](https://jorgehorst.com/es/servicios/): la escalera completa de servicios y las condiciones comerciales. - [Consultoría de SEO internacional](https://jorgehorst.com/es/consultor-seo-internacional/): arquitectura, hreflang, paridad de contenido e intención por mercado. - [Auditoría SEO y de visibilidad en IA](https://jorgehorst.com/es/auditoria-seo-visibilidad-ia/): cinco módulos, dos niveles. - [SEO para exportadores](https://jorgehorst.com/es/seo-para-exportadores/): para empresas latinoamericanas que venden a Europa y Estados Unidos y facturan en dólares o euros. Sin equivalente en inglés. - [Notas](https://jorgehorst.com/es/notas/): sección de notas en español, escrita en español y no traducida. Artículos: [GEO vs SEO: qué es el GEO y qué cambia de verdad](https://jorgehorst.com/es/notas/geo-vs-seo/), [Modo IA de Google: qué es y qué cambia para tu web](https://jorgehorst.com/es/notas/modo-ia-google/), [SEO para ChatGPT: cómo aparecer en sus respuestas](https://jorgehorst.com/es/notas/como-aparecer-en-chatgpt/), [Qué es llms.txt y qué hace de verdad en 2026](https://jorgehorst.com/es/notas/llms-txt/), [Cómo entrar en el mercado europeo con SEO desde Latinoamérica](https://jorgehorst.com/es/notas/seo-internacional-desde-latinoamerica/), [Hreflang: guía práctica y los errores que más cuestan](https://jorgehorst.com/es/notas/hreflang-guia-practica/) y [SEO para SaaS que venden a Estados Unidos](https://jorgehorst.com/es/notas/seo-saas-estados-unidos/). - [Herramientas](https://jorgehorst.com/es/herramientas/): las herramientas gratuitas, en versión española emparejada con hreflang a la inglesa. [Validador de hreflang](https://jorgehorst.com/es/herramientas/validador-hreflang/) — descarga una página y todas sus alternativas y dibuja la matriz de etiquetas de retorno. [Comprobador de visibilidad en IA](https://jorgehorst.com/es/herramientas/comprobador-visibilidad-ia/) — plantea una pregunta de cliente a Claude, OpenAI y Perplexity con búsqueda web en directo y muestra si nombran la marca, si citan su web y qué dominios citan. [Generador de hreflang](https://jorgehorst.com/es/herramientas/generador-hreflang/) — valida cada código contra la ISO 639-1 y la ISO 3166-1, rechaza en-UK (el código del Reino Unido es GB) y avisa de los códigos válidos que significan otra cosa: uk es ucraniano, eu es euskera, es-LA es español en Laos y ar-ME es árabe en Montenegro. No existe código ISO para Latinoamérica: o se usa es a secas o se segmenta país por país. [Calculadora de ROI de SEO](https://jorgehorst.com/es/herramientas/calculadora-roi-seo/) — curva en S con retraso ajustable y margen bruto aplicado, con euro, dólar, peso mexicano, colombiano, argentino y chileno, y sol peruano. [Probador de robots.txt](https://jorgehorst.com/es/herramientas/probador-robots-txt/) — prueba un robots.txt con 28 rastreadores de búsqueda y de IA según las reglas de Google e indica la regla que decide. [Generador de robots.txt](https://jorgehorst.com/es/herramientas/generador-robots-txt/) — bloquea el entrenamiento de IA sin salir de la búsqueda con IA y comprueba el archivo rastreador por rastreador. [Comprobador de SERP local](https://jorgehorst.com/es/herramientas/comprobador-serp-local/) — enlaces de búsqueda de Google por país, idioma y ciudad para varias palabras clave y mercados. [Previsión de tráfico SEO](https://jorgehorst.com/es/herramientas/prevision-trafico-seo/) — clics previstos por mercado con curva de CTR editable o calibrada con Search Console y pérdida por vistas creadas con IA. - [Link building y digital PR](https://jorgehorst.com/es/link-building/) · [Automatización SEO](https://jorgehorst.com/es/automatizacion-seo/) · [Sobre mí](https://jorgehorst.com/es/sobre-mi/) · [Contacto](https://jorgehorst.com/es/contacto/) ## Pages - [Home](https://jorgehorst.com/): Positioning, the three most common starting points, ideal client profiles, process and FAQ. - [About](https://jorgehorst.com/about/): Background, professional history, working principles, the employer exclusion, tools used. - [Contact](https://jorgehorst.com/contact/): Free 30-minute discovery call. Replies within 24 hours on weekdays, in English or Spanish. ## Optional - [Privacy policy](https://jorgehorst.com/privacy/): What the site collects, which processors are involved, and GDPR rights. - [Terms of service](https://jorgehorst.com/terms/): Scope, fees and payment, the employer conflict exclusion, AI assistance disclosure, the white-hat methods commitment, and what is never promised.