Can I check hreflang tags in Google Search Console?

Not directly any more. Hreflang errors used to appear in the International Targeting report, which Google has deprecated, and Google's hreflang guide now points to third-party tools rather than a Search Console report. Google still reads hreflang, so it is worth checking. Confirm the tags are in the HTML Google fetched, validate the whole set with a crawler, and watch which countries' searchers land on which language version.

What Google still does with hreflang

Google's deprecation notice says it will keep supporting and using hreflang. The annotations tell Google which URLs are language or regional versions of the same page, so it can show searchers the most suitable one. You can declare them in HTML link elements in the <head>, in HTTP headers or in your sitemap; Google treats the three as equivalent, and using more than one adds nothing.

The rules most implementations break

• Every version lists itself and all the others. If two pages don't both point to each other, Google ignores the pair.
• Codes follow ISO. A language code (ISO 639-1), optionally followed by a region (ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2): de, de-at, pt-br. A region on its own is invalid, and values such as UK or EU have no effect; the United Kingdom is gb.
• URLs are absolute. Each alternate needs the full address, https:// included. Alternates may sit on other domains.
• A fallback is optional but useful. x-default names the page for searchers whose language matches none of your versions, often a language picker.

How to check hreflang today

1. Confirm Google sees the tags. Inspect a localised URL, open the crawled page's HTML and search for hreflang. Tags added only by a script that failed to run, or stripped by a cache, show up here as missing.
2. Validate the full set with a crawler. Missing return links and bad codes only show when every version is compared with the others, which needs a site crawl with an hreflang check. Google points to a couple of third-party tools but says it doesn't maintain or check them.
3. Read the outcome in the Performance report. Filter Page to one language folder, such as /de/, and open the Countries tab. Impressions from countries that folder isn't meant for suggest the right version isn't being served. Reverse it by filtering to one country and reading the Pages tab.

Problems that look like hreflang failures

• Automatic redirects by IP or browser language. Google advises against them: Googlebot mostly crawls from the US without an Accept-Language header, so it may never see your other versions. Link the versions to each other instead (multi-regional sites).
• Untranslated pages. Versions whose main content was never translated count as duplicates, and Google may fold them together.
• The lang attribute. Google works out a page's language from its visible text, not from lang or the URL.

For the wider picture, see what happened to International Targeting.

How AutoPSEO helps

The Internationalization report reads your Search Console data by page and country, works out which market each URL serves from its folder or subdomain (/de/, /fr-ca/, de.example.com), and shows for every country how many impressions reached the right version, another market's version or your default pages. Countries where most impressions land on the wrong version are flagged, which is the hreflang failure that matters in practice.