When I say just translating, I mean only translating to the main language of the country and not changing the content. Just translating content is not targeting the country. You should be hiring someone native to that country to help rewrite things for the people in that country. Geotargeting means each country has content that is targeted to them. If a company is not going to take the time to target the content to the country in question, then it is just mere translation and that can cause duplicate content issues.

If you are in fact targeting countries and not just translating, I'd use subfolders. It gives your new sub sites a running start by keeping the same domain authority as the bigger site.

Are you targeting actual countries or just people speaking different languages?

Wish I had something more to add here, but this is the best answer I've seen. To me it sounds like Google is testing something and it is probably just with a handful of brands. I would be interested if this continues through to next week. But it really does sound like a test to see if people searching for branded terms really don't want to see ads and how hard they will work to get to the ads.

At least no one is beating you?