In [4], Guan, Murugan and Wei established the equivalence of the classical Helmholtz equation with a “fractional Helmholtz” equation in which the Laplacian operator is replaced by the nonlocal fractional Laplacian operator. More general equivalence results are obtained for symbols which are complete Bernstein and satisfy additional regularity conditions. In this work we introduce a novel and general set-up for this Helmholtz equivalence problem. We show that under very mild and easy-to-check conditions on the Fourier multiplier, the general Helmholtz equation can be effectively reduced to a localization statement on the support of the symbol.