Hreflang Validation

The Hreflang tab inspects <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..."> tags across every crawled page and validates them as a set. Hreflang declarations tell search engines which version of a page to serve to users in a given language or region. A single broken declaration — a missing return link, an invalid language code, a forgotten self-reference — can prevent Google from associating the variants at all.

Stats

The top of the tab presents a summary of the hreflang state across the crawl:

Stat	What it measures
Total pages	The number of pages included in the crawl.
Pages with hreflang	Pages that declare at least one `hreflang` link tag.
Pages with self-reference	Pages whose hreflang set includes an entry pointing back to the page itself — a requirement in the specification.
Pages with x-default	Pages that declare an `x-default` hreflang value, designating a fallback URL for users whose language or region does not match any declared variant.
Unique languages	The distinct count of language and language-region codes found across the crawl.

Below the stats, a row of language badges lists every language and region code encountered. This gives a quick visual inventory of which locales the site declares support for.

Validation checks

The analysis runs five checks against the hreflang data collected during the crawl. Each check produces findings with a severity level and the affected URL.

Bidirectional validation

If page A declares page B as an alternate-language version, page B must declare page A back. This is the most common source of hreflang failures. A one-way declaration is ignored by Google entirely — neither page benefits. The check walks every declared pair and flags any link that is not reciprocated.

Self-reference present

Every page in an hreflang set must include an entry pointing to itself with its own language code. Without the self-reference, search engines cannot confirm which language the declaring page represents, and the full set of alternates may be disregarded.

x-default present

The x-default value designates a fallback URL for users whose language or region does not match any explicitly declared variant. While not strictly required, its absence means there is no defined fallback — a gap that can send unmatched users to an arbitrary variant. Pages that declare hreflang without including an x-default entry are flagged.

Valid language and region codes

Hreflang values must use ISO 639-1 language codes, optionally followed by an ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 region code (for example en, en-GB, pt-BR). Values that do not conform — a three-letter language code, a region without a language, or a typo like uk instead of uk-UA — are flagged as invalid.

Coverage

Coverage checks whether the set of declared languages is consistent across pages. If most pages in the crawl declare en, fr, and de, but a subset only declares en and fr, the missing de variant is flagged. Incomplete coverage usually means a page was added to one locale and not the others.

Reading the results

Below the stats and validation summary, the issues list shows every finding from the checks above. Each row includes:

Column	What it shows
Severity	How likely the issue is to affect indexing. Missing return links and invalid codes are high severity; a missing `x-default` is medium.
URL	The page where the issue was found. Click to open the page inspector.
Description	A short explanation of the specific problem, including the language code or target URL involved.

The issues list can be sorted by severity or filtered to a single check type. For bidirectional failures, the description names both the declaring page and the target that does not link back, so the fix is unambiguous.

One limitation worth noting: the analysis checks what the markup declares. It verifies that return links exist within the crawled page set and that language codes are well-formed, but it cannot verify that a target page actually serves content in the declared language. That verification requires reading the page content itself, which is outside the scope of a markup-level audit.