Bill 96 and your website: what Quebec actually requires, and what it means for your SEO

1. What the law requires, and what didn’t change

Quebec’s Charter of the French Language has long required commercial publications to be in French: catalogues, brochures, flyers, directories and other commercial documents available to the public. Business websites fall under the same rule, as does commercial content on social media.¹ Other languages are allowed, on one condition: the French version must be at least as accessible and prominent as the version in another language.¹

The 1 June 2025 date got a lot of coverage outside Quebec. It mainly concerned two things: public signage visible from outside a business, where French must now be markedly predominant, and trademarks, where generic or descriptive terms must now follow the rule that French comes first.² For websites, McCarthy Tétrault puts it plainly: Bill 96 did not significantly change website availability requirements. A site that isn’t compliant today wasn’t compliant before either.²

What changed is the risk. Media coverage in 2025 increased complaints, and fines were raised in 2022. For a business, they range from $3,000 to $30,000 for a first offence, $6,000 to $60,000 for a second, and $9,000 to $90,000 after that. Directors can also be held personally liable.³ In practice, the OQLF generally starts by asking the business to comply within a set period; prosecution follows when that request is ignored.⁴

2. Does it apply to companies outside Quebec?

This is the question I hear most from Ontario and Western Canadian clients. According to Fasken’s analysis, a transaction isn’t required: it can be enough to intend to make goods or services available to the Quebec market. A company claiming it doesn’t serve Quebec customers may have to show it to the OQLF.³

In concrete terms, a Toronto online store that ships to Montréal, or a Vancouver SaaS company that accepts Quebec customers, should take the question seriously and check its position with counsel. It is also, as we’ll see, a commercial opportunity most of them miss.

3. “At least as accessible”: what it means on a website

The law doesn’t come with a technical checklist. But a cautious reading of “at least as accessible and prominent” translates naturally into design requirements. Here they are, in the order I find them in audits:

• Missing pages. The home page and services are translated, but not the blog, product pages, FAQ, terms of sale or downloadable PDFs.
• A two-speed French site. The English version gets new launches, promotions and updates first; the French version follows weeks later, if at all.
• A journey that falls back to English. The visitor starts in French, then the cart, form, confirmation email or customer portal appears in English.
• A hard-to-find language switcher, or one that always sends people to the other language’s home page instead of the equivalent page.

Each of these is a potential compliance issue. Each is also an SEO problem: missing pages can’t rank, lagging pages lose freshness, and a journey that switches language hurts conversion.

4. SEO trap #1: automatic redirects

This is the issue I find most often on bilingual Canadian sites, and the most costly. The site detects the browser language or the visitor’s IP address and automatically sends them to “their” version.

For a human in Quebec, it seems to work. For Google, it’s a black hole. Google’s documentation is explicit: Googlebot usually crawls from the United States and sends requests without an Accept-Language header. Google therefore recommends avoiding automatic redirects from one language version to another, and offering visible links to choose a language instead.⁵ A common result: the crawler is sent to the English version every time, and part of the French site is never crawled.

The fix satisfies both the law and Google: separate URLs for each language, a visible switcher that leads to the equivalent page, and optionally a banner that suggests a language without ever forcing a redirect.

5. Translation is not ranking

A French version that faithfully mirrors your English site may satisfy the Charter. It still rarely ranks well, because Quebec searchers don’t use a translator’s words. A few examples that come up repeatedly in my keyword research:

These gaps aren’t universal and vary by industry. Don’t rely on my table or on your translator’s instinct: check Google Keyword Planner filtered on French and the province of Quebec, and look at what already ranks on Google.ca in French. That is the difference between a translation and a French site that earns its keep.

The same logic applies to structure. An English page targeting one broad term can map, in French, to two distinct intents that deserve two pages. That’s why I build each language on its own keyword research rather than translating a sitemap.

6. The technical checklist

Once the content exists, here is what lets Google (and AI engines) understand that you have two equivalent versions, and serve the right one to each searcher:

1. Separate URLs per language, such as /fr/ and /en/, or two distinct files. Never two languages on one URL based on a session setting.
2. Reciprocal hreflang tags: fr-CA, en-CA and an x-default, declared on every page and pointing to the exact equivalent.⁶
3. A self-referencing canonical, never pointing to the other language.
4. Everything Google reads, in French: title tag, meta description, image alt text, URL slug, breadcrumbs and menus.
5. Structured data in French, with inLanguage set to fr-CA.
6. An XML sitemap listing both versions, ideally with their hreflang alternates.
7. The extras: a French product feed in Merchant Center if you sell online, and a Google Business Profile description and posts in French if you have a Quebec location.

7. What about machine translation?

Translation tools have become excellent, and I use them myself as a starting point. The risk isn’t the tool, it’s publishing at scale without review. Google’s spam policies list automated translation among the transformations that can count as scaled content abuse when it’s used to generate many pages that add little value.⁷

My approach is simple: machine-assisted translation for volume, review by someone who knows Quebec French, and a full rewrite for the pages that need to rank (home, services, categories, pillar pages). Legal pages can wait for the second pass; your sales pages can’t.

8. The AI layer: AI Mode and ChatGPT in French

Google’s AI Mode launched in Canada in English in August 2025, and in French in October 2025.⁸ When someone asks a question in French, the generated answer looks for French-language sources. If your French version is thin, incomplete or hidden behind a redirect, the engine cites someone else, often a European site or a directory.

I covered in another article why generative engines cite foreign sources for Canadian queries. The short version: a complete French version, tied to your English version through hreflang and a shared entity in your structured data, is one of the easiest signals to fix.

9. A 20-minute audit

1. Open your site in a private window with the browser set to English. Can you reach the French version of every page in one click?
2. Run three important French pages through Search Console’s URL Inspection. Are they indexed, and is the rendered page actually in French?
3. Compare the number of indexed pages in French and in English. A large gap points to missing or invisible pages.
4. Check the hreflang and canonical tags on those three pages (right-click, view source).
5. Go through the full journey in French: form, cart, confirmation email. Note every place English reappears.
6. Ask ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, in French, the question a Quebec customer would type to find a business like yours. Who gets cited?

If two of these six checks fail, your French version is probably costing you customers, before compliance even enters the conversation.

Questions I get asked

Sources