Internationalization support

Release version: Yokohama

Updated May 29, 2026

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Summary of Internationalization support

ServiceNow AI Search supports indexing and searching across all languages offered by the ServiceNow AI Platform®. Search administrators can configure AI Search features to work with the languages activated in their instance, enabling effective search experiences for diverse user bases.

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Search features

AI Search provides a comprehensive set of search features tailored to specific languages, improving search accuracy and user satisfaction. These features include Genius Results, language identification, lemma and Unicode normalization, result improvement rules, stop words, synonyms, and typo handling. The availability of these features varies by language group as follows:

Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, English, French (including Canada), Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Turkish: Full support of all listed search features.
Finnish: Supports lemma and Unicode normalization using algorithmic stemming.
German, Danish, Hungarian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Swedish: Includes decompounding for lemma and Unicode normalization.
Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese: Advanced language identification including text-region and search-term identification.
Korean: Supports decompounding in lemma and Unicode normalization.
All other languages: Support Unicode normalization, result improvement rules, stop words, and synonyms.

Translated content search

By default, AI Search returns results only for records with translated content matching the user’s current ServiceNow AI Platform session language. Administrators can customize this behavior through several configurations:

Assign Knowledge article search languages by country: Define multiple search languages per user country to broaden search recall across those languages plus the session language.
Configure globally searchable knowledge articles: Use encoded queries to make specific knowledge articles searchable regardless of the user’s session language.
Configure a fallback language: Specify a fallback language for the session, so search results include translated content from both the session and fallback languages.
Enable a global fallback locale: Set a global fallback locale for all translated content searches, which is particularly effective for making all English-language records searchable worldwide.

These options help organizations improve multilingual search relevance and accessibility, ensuring users receive comprehensive results across multiple languages.

AI Search supports indexing and search for all languages offered by the ServiceNow AI Platform®. Search administrators can configure AI Search search features for languages activated in your instance.

For full details on language support in AI Search search features, see Internationalization support for AI Search.

Search features

The following table displays the set of AI Search search features available for specific ServiceNow AI Platform languages.

Table 1. Search features supported by language
Language	Search features supported
Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, French - Canada, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish	Genius Results Language identification Lemma and Unicode normalization Result improvement rules Stop words Synonyms Typo handling
Finnish	Genius Results Language identification Lemma and Unicode normalization (using algorithmic stemming to identify lemmas) Result improvement rules Stop words Synonyms Typo handling
German, Danish, Hungarian, Norwegian (Bokmål), and Swedish	Genius Results Language identification Lemma and Unicode normalization (including decompounding) Result improvement rules Stop words Synonyms Typo handling
Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese	Language identification (including text-region and search-term identification) Lemma and Unicode normalization Result improvement rules Stop words Synonyms
Korean	Genius Results Language identification Lemma and Unicode normalization (including decompounding) Result improvement rules Stop words Synonyms
All other ServiceNow AI Platform languages activated in your instance	Unicode normalization Result improvement rules Stop words Synonyms

Translated content search

By default, AI Search only returns results for records with translated content, such as knowledge articles, that are in the user's ServiceNow AI Platform session language. You can modify this default behavior in several ways:

Assign Knowledge article search languages by country: Improve multilingual search recall by defining a set of Knowledge article search languages for each user country. User searches can match Knowledge articles in any of the search languages specified for their country as well as in the language associated with their ServiceNow AI Platform session.
Configure globally searchable knowledge articles: Define an encoded query to match knowledge articles that you want to make searchable regardless of the user's session language.
Configure a fallback language: Set a fallback language for the user's session language. AI Search returns translated content results from the selected fallback language as well as the user's session language.
Enable a global fallback locale for translated content: Configure a global fallback locale to use for all translated content searches. AI Search returns translated content results from the global fallback locale's language as well as the user's session language.
Note:
The global fallback locale works best if you want to make all English-language records globally searchable.