Every AI assistant advertising in the EU leads with an English line. Where they split is how wide that English line runs and how much they translate around it. Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires, shows the actual language and country of every App Store ad. We read the AI assistant advertisers through it. Data window ends 16 July 2026.
The one thing they all agree on
Every app's longest-running creative is English, and English carries the widest footprint for all of them. ChatOn's "One Chatbot, Multiple AI Tools" runs in 18 countries. Perplexity's "Ask. Research. Trusted Answers" runs in 20. ChatGPT's year-long "The official app by OpenAI" ran in 16. Grok's "AI chat & video generation" ran in 17. Nobody translates the hero line. It stays English and goes everywhere, because one English creative in twenty storefronts is the cheapest way to find out whether the hook works at all.
Translation, when it happens, is the supporting act. It shows up in the big-5 EU languages (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese), each in one or two markets, and it arrives after the English line has proven itself.
Two ways to run the same category
Run English wide, translate late and thin. Perplexity is the clearest version. Its English line has run across 20 countries since October 2025. Only in March 2026 did it start adding native lines, German first, then Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and French, and each of those runs in just one or two markets. English does the heavy lifting; translation is a thin layer on top of the markets big enough to earn it. ChatOn works the same way: English across 18 countries, plus native German, Dutch, and Portuguese lines running around 100 days each.
Run English narrow, lean on native. Google's Gemini is the opposite. Its English line "Your AI assistant from Google" runs in only about 6 countries, and it leans on native creatives instead: "Dein KI-Assistent von Google" and "O assistente de IA da Google" have both held past 100 days and are still live. Gemini translates earlier and trusts English less, which fits a company that already localizes everything it ships.
ChatGPT sits in the middle, translating into the most languages of anyone here (seven, including Dutch and Swedish), but its translated lines turn over in weeks while the challengers' translated lines run for months.
Translation changes the message, not just the words
The most useful thing in the data is what happens to the pitch when it crosses a language. Perplexity's English hero sells "trusted answers", the research angle. Its German line sells "search and discover with AI" and its Portuguese and Spanish lines sell "precise answers". In-language, Perplexity stops talking about research and starts positioning against the search box people already use. ChatGPT's English "the official app by OpenAI" becomes "your everyday AI assistant" in French and German, a habit pitch rather than an authority pitch.
Translation here is repositioning. The English line establishes what the product is; the local lines argue for it against whatever that market defaults to.
Translating more did not buy longevity
Grok translated into eight languages during its April to June 2026 push, more coverage than Perplexity has now. Every one of those creatives has stopped. Coverage is not the same as commitment. One English line held live for 283 days, the way Perplexity runs it, tells you more than eight translated lines that ran for two months and went dark.
What a founder should do
If you are pre-scale, copy the wide-English camp. Run one English creative across every EU storefront you can, cheaply, and let longevity tell you whether the hook works. Do not translate on day one; you would be paying to localize a line you have not proven. Once one English line has run for months, translate it into your two or three biggest non-English markets, and expect to rewrite the message for each, not just the words. Check monthly: a new native line appearing on a rival's board means they found a market worth the creative work.
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Method note: figures are computed from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39), across 25 EU storefronts, data window ending 16 July 2026. Country counts are the distinct storefronts a creative ran in; language is the ad's declared default language tag. Translations shown are literal glosses of the advertisers' own lines, for readers who do not speak them. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. We invented no numbers beyond what the repository reports. Refreshed monthly.