Visibility in Norway and the NetherlandsWhy it's easier to get found in Norway than in the Netherlands
There's far less Norwegian text on the web than Dutch, even after you account for the difference in the number of speakers. That makes it easier right now to get found in Norway, and to get named as a source. The advantage is temporary.
I was born in the Netherlands, moved to Norway and work in both markets. I help companies with marketing localization between Dutch, English and Norwegian. Below are the figures behind that gap, what I see in practice that you won't find in any report, and what to do about it.
How do the Netherlands and Norway differ?
On paper they look alike: two prosperous northern European countries. On the points that matter for getting found, they don't.
| Measure | Netherlands | Norway |
|---|---|---|
| Share of all websites in this language | 2.1% | 0.2% (Bokmål) |
| Speakers, approximately | ~25 million | ~5.4 million |
| Online share of retail | 18.3% | 10 to 15% |
| English (EF EPI 2025) | 1st, 624 points | 5th, 613 points |
| AI Overviews available | yes | yes |
The rest of this article covers what those differences mean in practice. It also covers one difference no table can hold: how trustworthy the information you find on this subject is in each market.
How much less Norwegian text is there online?
About a tenth of what there is in Dutch. W3Techs continuously measures which language websites are written in.
| Language | Share of websites | Ratio to Norwegian |
|---|---|---|
| English | 49.5% | ~248x |
| German | 5.9% | ~30x |
| Dutch | 2.1% | ~11x |
| Swedish | 0.5% | ~2.5x |
| Danish | 0.4% | ~2x |
| Norwegian (Bokmål) | 0.2% | 1x |
| Norwegian (Nynorsk) | less than 0.1% | less than 0.5x |
On its own, that says little: Norway is simply a small country. It gets interesting when you set it against the number of speakers.
Dutch has roughly 25 million speakers and Norwegian roughly 5.4 million. That's a ratio of about 4.6 to 1. On the web, the ratio is about 10 to 1. So Norwegian is roughly twice as underrepresented online as its number of speakers explains.
Two caveats, because they matter. That 0.2% is rounded, so the real ratio is somewhere between eight and fourteen. And how many speakers Dutch has depends on whether you count Flanders and Suriname. Neither changes the direction; both change the exact factor.
Why this matters for getting found: search engines and AI answers draw on what exists. For a Norwegian question, there are simply fewer sources to choose from. The same effort goes further in Norwegian than in Dutch, because you're competing with fewer others for the same spot.
But don't Norwegians just search in English?
I hear that argument a lot, and it doesn't hold up: it applies to the Netherlands just as much.
In the EF English Proficiency Index for 2025, the Netherlands ranks 1st with 624 points and Norway 5th with 613. By that index, the Dutch are slightly better at English than Norwegians. If good English were a reason not to bother with the local language, that would apply to the Netherlands first. It doesn't.
I'll be honest: I couldn't find a reliable source that publishes what share of searches in Norway are typed in English. Those figures aren't public. If someone hands you such a percentage, it's estimated or made up.
What I do see: the closer someone gets to a purchase, the more often it happens in their own language. Someone researching a technical subject reads English easily. Someone looking for a local supplier does it in Norwegian.
Which language you use where, and how far you take it, is exactly the call I make in marketing localization.
I've written separately about when English does the job in these markets, and when it doesn't.
Source: EF English Proficiency Index.
How differently do customers in Norway buy?
Less online, and with more attention to trust. The figure on online buying comes from research. The rest of this section is what I see in client work in both countries, and no tool will give you that.
Buying online is less established in Norway. In the Netherlands, about 18.3% of retail now happens online, above the European average of 14.7%. For Norway, estimates land at 10 to 15%. Those figures don't come from the same measurement, so they aren't exactly comparable, but the direction is clear. It also matches what I see: the Norwegian market is growing online, but the store is still often where it ends.
In Norway I more often see a deliberate preference for something from the country itself. A product made in Norway, or a service from a Norwegian supplier, gets picked more readily there, more strongly than I notice in the Netherlands. So a foreign supplier starts with a disadvantage that's easy to underestimate from a Dutch perspective. A Norwegian address, a Norwegian phone number, Norwegian text that doesn't read as translated and a visible presence in Norway aren't details.
In the Netherlands I mostly see buyers compare. In Norway, the time goes to trust first. The Dutch buyers I deal with put prices side by side and switch easily. With Norwegian customers, more of the time is spent establishing whether you can be trusted. Once that's settled, things move faster.
For getting found, that means something concrete: in Norway, getting found more often leads to a store visit or a phone call than to an order. Your Google Business Profile, your hours, your place in Maps and how easy you are to reach do more there than a perfectly optimized product page. Copy a Dutch e-commerce approach into Norway unchanged, and you're optimizing for the wrong outcome.
What a foreign online store has to arrange for Norwegian VAT, and what Temu is changing, I've covered in the article on selling to Norway.
Sources: e-commerce statistics 2026 for the Netherlands and the European average, ECDB for Norway.
Considering the move into Norway? Send me your website and your plans. I'll tell you what I think has to change before you have anything translated.
Email me your questionWhich review platforms count in Norway?
Trustpilot and the platforms specific to your industry. You collect Google reviews too, but in Norway they carry less weight as a trust signal than you'd expect coming from the Netherlands.
That last part is the easiest to miss. In the Netherlands, a strong Google profile is often enough social proof. In Norway I see people look further: at Trustpilot, at a platform specific to your trade and at what's being said about you on social media.
That doesn't mean you can ignore Google reviews. They still feed your Business Profile, your place in Maps and what Google shows about you. They just carry less of the trust on their own in Norway. Use them, but don't lean on them as your only evidence.
I see social media playing a bigger role in Norway, including when people buy. Facebook is still widely used there, while it's losing ground in the Netherlands. So an active page with recent, real responses does more for your credibility in Norway than many companies assume.
There's a Norwegian review platform too, NorskeAnmeldelser. Don't expect too much from it. It reports over 10,000 reviews of more than 1,000 businesses and belongs to an international network running in more than twenty countries. Next to Trustpilot, that's small. Being there costs little, but it isn't where the weight is.
If you come across advice to get certified for Trygg e-handel, the Norwegian trust mark for online stores: it looks like it no longer exists. The certification page returns a 404, and the site now sits at an archive address. A Norwegian e-commerce publication reports that it closed on February 1, 2025. I couldn't get that confirmed by Virke, so treat the date with caution. Either way, don't assume you can still apply for it.
| Platform | Role in the Norwegian market |
|---|---|
| Trustpilot | Large, and often the first place someone looks |
| Industry-specific platforms | Large; which ones varies by trade |
| Google reviews | Present, but less decisive than you'd expect coming from the Netherlands |
| Meta (Facebook, Instagram) | Large; Facebook is still widely used there |
| NorskeAnmeldelser | Small, but Norwegian |
| Trygg e-handel | A trust mark that no longer seems to exist |
For AI answers, all of this counts double: what other people write about you is one of the few things that doesn't come from you. Ask for it, respond to it and pay particular attention to how recent it is. One specific story from last month does more than twenty stale ones.
Bokmål or Nynorsk, and which language code?
Bokmål, with the same language code everywhere: nb. Norwegian has two official written standards. For commercial text you pick Bokmål in practice, because that's what the great majority of Norwegians read and write. But there's a technical side to it that almost never comes up.
Språkrådet, the Language Council of Norway, says two things that bear directly on this. First, that multilingual datasets mostly don't distinguish between Bokmål and Nynorsk: "Dei fleirspråklege datasetta skil stort sett ikkje mellom bokmål og nynorsk." Second, that the language codes themselves get used carelessly: "Ver merksame på at språkkodane no, nb og nn ikkje vert brukte på ein konsekvent måte."
What do you do with that? Pick one code and use it consistently everywhere: in your lang attribute, in your hreflang and in your sitemap. For Bokmål, that's nb. Don't switch between no and nb from page to page. Then a system has to guess what you mean, and guessing is exactly what you want to avoid when there's already so little Norwegian material to compare you against.
What I'm not claiming: that Nynorsk pages rank worse. People say so, but I couldn't find a source for it, so I'm leaving it as an open question.
Decisions like this are part of marketing localization. It's rarely just about getting the words right.
Source: Språkrådet on access to language data (in Norwegian).
Why do you have to read more critically in Norway?
Because in the Netherlands people test and publish on this subject, and in Norway they barely do yet. Of all the differences between the two markets, this one struck me most, and it isn't about language.
An example from the Netherlands. In May 2026, Frankwatching published a GEO experiment by Rick Zuidbroek that set organic performance at twenty companies against their server logs. At one site, organic traffic dropped 70% because of a programming error, and visits from ChatGPT-User halved along with it. The conclusion, in Dutch: "zodra de organische vindbaarheid in Google instortte, daalde ook het aantal crawls door ChatGPT-User drastisch." In other words: as soon as organic visibility in Google collapsed, crawls by ChatGPT-User dropped sharply too.
Twenty companies is a small sample, correlation isn't causation and a crawl isn't a citation. But there's a name on it and a method behind it, and it points the same way as everything else: AI visibility leans on ordinary search visibility.
Search for the same subject in Norwegian, and the most visible "research" is a Norwegian AI visibility report that turns out, once you click through, to be an agency's service page. It talks about more than 200 Norwegian AI searches analyzed and five factors AI supposedly selects on, with no account of the sample and no evidence for those five factors.
I don't bring that up to run down a competitor. I bring it up because it says something about the market: in the Netherlands you can build on published field tests, and in Norway you barely can yet. That's why the bar for becoming a credible source there is low right now. It won't stay that way: once others fill the gap, the bar goes up.
Source: Frankwatching, GEO experiment, May 8, 2026 (in Dutch).
What do you do with this?
If you already work in the Netherlands and you're considering Norway, this is the order I'd follow.
- Don't translate your Dutch site one-to-one. A translation that reads well still doesn't sell. The assumptions underneath are different: less buying online, more trust needed up front and a stronger preference for Norwegian.
- Make sure you're visible in Norway first. How to set up a profile in a second country is in the section on working in two countries. Business Profile, address, phone number, hours, reviews. In a market where the purchase often ends offline, that's not a side issue.
- Pick Bokmål and one language code, and keep it the same everywhere.
- Write about subjects that don't have a good Norwegian answer yet. Search your question in Norwegian and see what comes back. If it's thin, that's your opening.
- Check what you read. Click through to the source before you repeat a figure. In the Norwegian market, that figure comes from someone selling you something remarkably often.
Want the foundation in place first? That's in the online visibility basics, and I describe the technical side under SEO and AI visibility. Cross-border work falls under marketing localization, because it's rarely only about language.
When won't getting found help?
When your offer doesn't fit Norway. This article is about getting found. Whether your offer matches what Norwegian customers want, what it should cost and how you deliver it: visibility says nothing about any of that.
In my experience, a Dutch company that doesn't take off in Norway is more often dealing with an offer problem than a visibility problem. In that case, more reach mostly gets you more people saying no.
Working in both markets?
Send me your website and the market you want to move into. I'll tell you where I think your biggest bottleneck is, even if it isn't visibility.
Dominique@framvekst.noYou'll hear back within three business days.
See my contact details