What are hreflang tags?

Hreflang tags tell search engines which page to show visitors based on their language or region. A site with English, French, and German versions of the same page uses hreflang tags to link those versions together, so a French speaking user searching Google gets pointed at the French page instead of the English one.

They live in the page's <head> as <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..."> tags, and they're easy to get wrong: a typo in a language code, a missing self reference, or a missing x-default fallback can quietly break international SEO without throwing any visible error.

Tool description

This tool fetches a page's HTML on the server, extracts every hreflang tag, and validates them. It checks that each hreflang value is a real language or region code, flags duplicates, warns when the page doesn't reference itself, and warns when there's no x-default fallback for unmatched languages.

Features

  • Fetches and parses hreflang tags directly from a live URL, no need to view source yourself
  • Validates language and region codes and flags case and formatting issues
  • Warns about common mistakes: missing self references, duplicates, and missing x-default

Tips

  • Every set of hreflang tags on a page should include a link back to the page itself. If this tool reports a missing self reference, check that the current URL is listed among its own alternates.
  • Language codes should be lowercase and region codes uppercase, for example en-US not EN-us.