Can I check hreflang tags in Google Search Console?
Technical SEO
Not directly any more. The International Targeting report, which used to list hreflang errors such as missing return links, has been retired, and Search Console no longer validates hreflang annotations anywhere in the interface.
What Search Console still gives you is evidence of the outcome: whether the right locale is actually being served to the right country.
What hreflang does
An hreflang annotation tells Google that several URLs are the same content in different languages or regions, so it can swap in the right one for the searcher. It does not improve rankings and it does not consolidate signals the way a canonical does. It only influences which version is shown.
The rules that break most implementations
- Return links must be bidirectional. If page A points to B, B must point back to A, or the pair is ignored.
- Use the right codes. ISO 639-1 for language, optionally ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 for region, as in
en,en-gb,pt-br. There is noen-uk, and a region on its own is invalid. - Every set is self-referencing. Each page lists itself alongside its alternates.
- Point at canonical, indexable URLs. An hreflang target that is redirected, noindexed or canonicalised elsewhere is dropped.
- Add
x-defaultfor the fallback page used when no locale matches. - Pick one implementation: HTML
<head>links, HTTP headers or the XML sitemap. Mixing them tends to produce conflicts.
How to check it without the old report
- Crawl the site with any SEO crawler that reports hreflang return links and code validity.
- Use URL Inspection > View crawled page to confirm the annotations exist in the HTML Googlebot actually fetched, which catches JavaScript-injected tags that never make it into the crawl.
- In Performance, add the Country dimension and filter to one locale's pages. Traffic from the wrong countries is the practical symptom of broken or missing hreflang.
Tip: hreflang errors rarely show up as a ranking drop. They show up as the wrong-language page ranking in a market, so watch clicks by country per locale folder rather than sitewide position.
Related: international targeting.
How AutoPSEO helps
The Internationalization report uses country-by-page data to show how well each language or country version reaches its intended audience, and flags cases where the wrong locale or domain is capturing a country's traffic.
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