Free Hreflang Tag Checker

Missing x-default, self-referential tag, duplicate locales, invalid language codes, and relative URLs.

x-default tells Google which page to show users whose language/region is not specifically targeted.

Yes, completely free.

Absolutely. The Hreflang Tag Checker processes everything client-side in your browser. No data is uploaded to or stored on any server. Your content remains private on your device at all times.

Yes, the Hreflang Tag Checker is fully responsive and works on smartphones and tablets. You can use it on any device with a modern web browser -- no app download required.

No account or registration is needed. Simply open the Hreflang Tag Checker in your browser and start using it immediately. There are no sign-up walls or usage restrictions.

Yes, the Hreflang Tag Checker is built following current Google Search guidelines and best practices. We regularly update the tool to reflect changes in search engine requirements.

Simply enter your input in the provided field, adjust any settings to your preference, and the tool will process it instantly. You can then copy the result to your clipboard or download it.

The Hreflang Tag Checker works in all modern browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Opera. For the best experience, use the latest version of your preferred browser.

A canonical tag and an hreflang tag solve different problems, and confusing them is a common cause of indexing trouble. A canonical (rel="canonical") tells Google which version of near-duplicate pages is the preferred one to index, consolidating ranking signals onto a single URL. Hreflang (rel="alternate" hreflang) does the opposite: it tells Google that several pages are legitimate language or regional variants that should all stay indexed, and which to show each user. The key rule is that each localized page should self-canonicalize, pointing its canonical at itself, not at one master language. Pointing every translation's canonical at the English page effectively tells Google to drop the translations, which silently breaks your hreflang setup. Paste your page's HTML above to confirm the hreflang annotations themselves are valid before you audit canonicals.

Google ignores hreflang annotations when they fail validation rather than warning you, which is why broken setups go unnoticed for months. The most frequent reasons are missing return links (page A points to page B, but B never points back to A, so the relationship is dropped), relative href values instead of absolute https URLs, missing self-referential tags, duplicate locale codes where the same code appears twice, and invalid language or region codes that aren't recognized BCP 47. A single conflicting canonical tag on the localized page can also override the whole cluster. Because these are structural problems, not visible on the rendered page, they're hard to spot by eye. Paste your page's HTML above and the checker lists each tag it finds and flags missing x-default, relative URLs, duplicates, and unknown locales instantly.

Yes. Every page in an hreflang set must include a tag that points to itself, in addition to tags for all its language and regional variants. So if you have English, French, and German versions, the English page lists all three hreflang annotations, and one of those points back to the English URL. Without that self-reference, the cluster is technically invalid and Google may disregard the entire set. This is the one rule that's invisible when you only inspect the markup, because you have to know which URL the page lives at to confirm the self-tag is present. That's why this checker has an optional Current Page URL field: enter the URL you're inspecting, paste the HTML, and it verifies the self-referential tag exists alongside the other validations.

Hreflang values follow BCP 47, which means an ISO 639-1 language code on its own, optionally followed by an ISO 3166-1 region code. A language-only value like "fr" targets all French speakers regardless of country, while "fr-CA" targets French speakers in Canada specifically. The language part is required; the region is optional but, when present, must be a valid country code, not a language. A frequent mistake is writing "en-uk" instead of the correct "en-gb," since UK is not the ISO country code for Britain. Codes are case-insensitive to crawlers, and the special value "x-default" marks your fallback page. This checker validates each code against a built-in list of common BCP 47 combinations and flags anything unrecognized, so paste your HTML above to catch malformed codes before they cost you international visibility.

Not entirely, because hreflang is bidirectional and this kind of check sees only one page at a time. When you paste a page's HTML, the tool validates that page's tags thoroughly: it confirms absolute URLs, a self-reference, an x-default, no duplicate locales, and valid codes. What it can't see is whether every other URL in the set links back, and missing return links cause Google to drop the relationship even when each page looks fine on its own. The practical workflow is to run each page in the cluster through the checker so you verify all of them list each other consistently. Also note this reads tags from the HTML head, so if your annotations live only in an XML sitemap or HTTP headers, paste the page markup here for the head-based check and audit those sources separately.