Hreflang Tag Validator
Paste the hreflang tags from your HTML
to automatically detect common multilingual SEO mistakes: missing x-default, missing self-reference, invalid language codes, and duplicate declarations.Tips
- Hreflang tags should be reciprocal across all language variants. This tool only checks the "self-reference" from a single page's tags, so also verify the cross-links between all your language pages manually.
- The language code check covers roughly 40 common languages and 50 region codes only. If you use a less common language or region, cross-check it against the official ISO 639-1 and ISO 3166-1 lists.
- Google Search Console's "International Targeting" report shows actual hreflang errors Google encountered while crawling your site — use it together with this tool for extra confidence.
- If your hreflang annotations live in sitemap.xml as
- x-default isn't strictly required, but setting it on a language-selector page or your most general-purpose language version protects visitors from countries you haven't explicitly targeted.
Frequently Asked Questions
Side Note — Why hreflang so often seems to "not work"
The hreflang attribute was introduced by Google in 2011 as a way to signal, for a set of pages that share the same content in different languages or regions, which URL should be shown to which searcher. Unlike a canonical tag, which folds duplicate URLs into a single preferred one, hreflang treats each language variant as an equal sibling page — get it right, and a Japanese searcher sees your Japanese page while an English searcher sees your English page in the results.
What makes hreflang unusually tricky compared to most other SEO signals is that mistakes rarely produce a visible error. A missing reciprocal link, a missing self-reference, or a mistyped language code all look completely normal in a browser — the only symptom is that the wrong page quietly shows up in search results for the wrong audience, something you'd only notice by actively checking Search Console's reports.
A site like this one, which serves content in eight languages, depends on consistent hreflang wiring across every page to capture search traffic properly. As the number of pages grows, keeping tags accurate by hand becomes increasingly error-prone, which is exactly the kind of tedious-but-effective check a tool like this is meant to automate before publishing.