What does Loi 96 require on a Quebec business website?

At least as favourable, in practice

The obligation has two parts. The site has to exist in French, and if it also exists in another language, the French version has to be available on terms at least as favourable, with no worse accessibility or quality. If the English site has forty pages, the French site cannot have twelve. If the English form is three fields and the French one is eight, that is a problem. If English loads by default from a Quebec IP address and French sits behind a small flag icon in the footer, that is the failure that gets noticed first.

The trademark exception got narrower

A trademark in another language can still appear on its own, registered or not, as long as no French version of it is registered. What changed on June 1, 2025 is what has to surround it. On products, any generic or descriptive words inside the mark now have to appear in French as well. On signs visible from outside the premises, French has to be markedly predominant wherever a non-French trademark appears.

For websites and other commercial publications the trademark rule did not change. The mark can stay in English, and everything around it still has to be available in French.

Francization now starts at twenty-five employees

The threshold for registering with the language regulator and going through francization dropped from fifty employees to twenty-five, also effective June 2025. That is a business-wide obligation rather than a website one, but it usually arrives in the same conversation.

The part that is not a legal question

A French site written by translation software reads as a translation, and Quebec customers can tell within a sentence. Machine output satisfies nobody and quietly costs conversions. Budget for a human writer for the pages that sell, even if the rest is translated cheaply.