Hreflang checker
Paste a URL. We read every hreflang tag on the page and check the four things that make Google discard a set: bad codes, a missing self-reference, duplicates, and relative URLs.
Free, no account, no card. One URL at a time.
What this checks
- Every tag on the page
- Listed, with the language codes it declares.
- Valid codes
- Shape-checked: a language, optionally a region, or x-default.
- The self-reference
- A page's hreflang set must include the page itself. Without it Google discards the whole set.
- Duplicates and relative URLs
- The same language twice contradicts itself; hreflang requires absolute URLs.
- x-default
- Optional, and it is what a visitor whose language matches none of yours gets served.
Why it matters
hreflang is unusually unforgiving. It is not a hint that gets partially applied - a set with one contradiction in it is dropped whole, and the symptom is the wrong language ranking in the wrong country with nothing in the report to explain it.
The most common mistake is the missing self-reference, because it feels redundant to link a page to itself. It is not: the set is how Google learns which pages are alternates of each other, and a page absent from its own set is not part of the group.
The second most common is return tags. Every page in the set has to point at all the others - which a single URL cannot show you, because it needs the other pages fetched too. A full crawl checks the whole set both ways.
Questions
- Do I need hreflang at all?
- Only if the same content exists in more than one language or for more than one country. On a single-language site it is a tag with nothing to say, and the tool reports that as fine rather than as missing.
- What is x-default for?
- It names the page to serve when none of your languages match the visitor's. A language picker or the international version of the homepage is the usual answer.
- Can this check return tags?
- Not from one URL - return tags mean every alternate has to be fetched as well. That is what the full audit does across the crawl.
One URL is a spot check
The full audit covers missing self-reference, no x-default, duplicate and mismatched codes, and alternates that 404 or redirect - across every page it crawls, with a score and a ranked list of what to fix first.