Verifying your hreflang implementation is important to ensure that search engines interpret language and regional targeting properly, preventing potential indexing issues.
To address this, various tools are available that can help simplify the verification process. This article explores different hreflang checkers, including online tools, browser extensions, standalone applications, and WordPress plugins.
What Are Hreflang Checkers
Hreflang checkers are tools designed to validate the hreflang implementation on a website. These tools help ensure that the hreflang tags are correctly set up, so search engines can accurately serve the right version of your content to users based on their language and geographic location.
Common Verifications Performed by Hreflang Checkers
Before diving into our list of hreflang checkers, it’s important to be aware of common tests conducted by these tools.
- Invalid HTTP Response – Check for hreflang URLs that return invalid HTTP responses. This ensures that the URLs linked in the hreflang tags are accessible and not leading to errors.
- Duplicate Hreflang Entries – Identify multiple hreflang tags for the same language or region on a page. Duplicate entries can confuse search engines and cause indexing issues.
- Missing Self-Referencing Hreflang – Ensure that each page includes a self-referencing hreflang tag, indicating its own language and region.
- Incorrect Language/Script/Region Codes – Verify that the language, script, and region ISO codes in hreflang tags are correct, ensuring proper targeting.
- Missing Hreflang X-Default – Check for the absence of the hreflang x-default tag, which tells search engines which page version to serve when no other hreflang rule applies.
- Missing Return Link – Identify missing reciprocal hreflang tags that are necessary for proper cross-linking between alternate versions of a page.
- Canonical and Hreflang Conflict – Detect conflicts between canonical and hreflang tags, which can lead to issues in how search engines index and serve content.
Top 10 Hreflang Checkers
Hreflang Manager
If your hreflang implementation is in a website built with WordPress, you can use the Hreflang Manager plugin to perform all the necessary checks that validate your implementation.
To use the hreflang audit tool provided by this plugin, install it and visit the Checker menu. Here you can start a general check that will verify all the common hreflang implementation problems.
The tool will check for common hreflang issues on all the URLs where hreflang data is present. The time it takes to complete the analysis depends on the number of URLs that need to be checked.
Hreflang Tag Checker
The Hreflang Tag Checker Chrome extension detects the hreflang tags available on the page and the presence of a back reference and makes this information available to the user in a dedicated report.
The user, when needed, can open or close the report by clicking on the extension’s icon in the Chrome toolbar.
Note that since this extension sends all HTTP requests through the browser to check pages, there are no usage limits as happens with other checkers.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool allows you to crawl your website and analyze all kinds of SEO elements, including hreflang tags. It’s incredibly useful for checking hreflang issues in bulk and provides an intuitive interface for managing the results.
To crawl a URL click the Start button. Then, proceed to the Hreflang tab. Here the app lists the hreflang issues. You can also use the filter to see only certain categories of errors.
It’s worth noting that this tool allows you to check hreflang implemented in page links and in sitemaps. From the Crawl section of the Spider Configuration options you can configure these two types of hreflang checks. More information on the process is available on this page.
hreflangchecker.com
The site hreflangchecker.com provides a free and simple solution to test your hreflang implementation.
To start, enter the URL you want to analyze in the provided input field and click Check Now. After a few seconds, the site will display the language and geographic target of the inspected URL along with the alternate pages present in the HTML.
A filter to display only specific results is available. You can also export the results in CSV format using the provided Export CSV button.
You can optionally test multiple URLs in a single operation. To do this, click the Enter Multiple URLs link to activate the bulk verification mode and enter your URLs, one per line in the provided text area.
Note that I recommend this tool if you need to verify the hreflang implementation on a limited number of URLs. This is because after a few checks, the tool will start generating CAPTCHAs. As a consequence, it might not be suitable to be used for large websites or for repetitive checks.
Technical SEO Hreflang Tool
Use the Hreflang Tags Testing Tools tool to easily check the hreflang implementation in the page HTML, on HTTP headers, and XML sitemaps.
To verify the hreflang implementation of a single URL, enter the URL along with a user agent.
After a few seconds, the tool will respond with general information on the tested page, like its HTTP response code, the number of hreflang tags found, and the geographic and regional target of the page defined with hreflang. An additional table will list the warnings detected; for example, here you will find messages like “Missing region-independent link for that language (en)” and more. Optionally, you can export the warnings as .xlsx (to read the data with local spreadsheet software) files or in Google Sheets.
If your site uses a sitemap, you can either select the Fetch option and provide the sitemap URL or select Upload and add the .xml file with the sitemap.
Semrush
Semrush, the popular all-in-one SEO tool, can verify hreflang on every page of your website. Here’s how you do it: first, proceed to the Site Audit page, click on the Statistics tab, and look for the Hreflang Usage section. Click on the percentage displayed beside the pages “With issues” or “Without hreflang” to get access to the related statistics.
For more information on checking hreflang with Semrush, please refer to this article.
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
The company behind the SEO analysis platform Ahrefs develops and maintains the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar browser extension. This extension includes the ability to check hreflang.
To find information on the hreflang tags, activate the Ahrefs SEO Tools extension on your favorite browser, versions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are also available. Then open the extension with the provided icon, visit the Indexability section, and scroll down to the end of the section to find the hreflang data. Here, the extension lists the configured alternate URLs of the page.
Weglot Hreflang Checker
The company behind the popular solution to manage website translations has its own hreflang checker, presented by the same company with this article.
As with the other online hreflang checkers, simply submit the URL that you want to check in the provided field to see the results.
Localizely Hreflang Checker
Hreflang Checker is the checker tool created by the team behind the Localizely software translation platform.
Sistrix Hreflang
Check your hreflang tags using the Sistrix validator. This tool offers up to 25 free URL checks per day. For additional checks, registration on the platform is needed.
Conclusions
We’ve seen that there are numerous tools available for validating hreflang tags. Hreflang checkers are relatively simple to create, and many companies that offer SEO-related services have developed their own versions.
While each tool presents data in slightly different ways, they all typically provide a table displaying alternate URLs and an additional report with the detected problems. As the site administrator, you have to follow the list of detected problems and solve them one by one to ensure your site is properly indexed and served to the correct users.