SEO & Content

Hreflang and Canonical Audit

Audit a page’s canonical and hreflang tags, language codes, x-default usage, self-reference, and sampled return links in a single report.

Hreflang & Canonical Cluster Audit
Information

About Hreflang and Canonical Audit

On multilingual or regional sites hreflang, tells the search engine which language and country versions of the same content are available. Canonical then indicates the canonical address you want indexed. If these two signals conflict, the search engine may show the wrong language version or ignore the hreflang set entirely.

This tool safely examines the page’s source HTML; it checks the canonical count and self-reference, hreflang language codes, duplicate languages and URLs, x-default the line, the alternative that points to the page itself, and html lang checks its nature. It also samples up to five alternative pages from the same origin (protocol, domain, and port) within the 12-second time budget to verify whether a return tag pointing to the source page is present.

The return check is performed on a limited sample to prevent abuse and long waits. It evaluates the server's HTML seen by search engines in the initial response, not tags added later with JavaScript.

How to use it?

Step by step

  1. The full address of the page you want to check https:// Enter it together with.
  2. Inspect Press the button; the tool safely fetches the page and a limited number of same-origin language alternatives.
  3. Below the score canonical, html lang, inspect the hreflang count and the return-tag summary.
  4. Fix the red issues first, then the yellow warnings, and repeat the audit across all language pages.
FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. If page A identifies page B as an alternate, page B must also provide a return link to page A. Google may ignore matches without a return tag. The tool checks this relationship by sampling up to five alternates using the same protocol, domain name, and port within the time budget.

Usually not. Pages that are true language equivalents of one another generally use self-referencing canonical and establish the relationship between them with hreflang. Having all languages point to a single language with canonical may cause the other versions to drop out of the index.

Not required; however, it is recommended if there is a language selector, redirect page, or default international version. It explains which page will be shown when it does not match the user's language.

ISO 639-1 format for the language (tr, en), if necessary, the hyphenated ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 form for the region (en-US, pt-BR) is used. The underscore (en_US) do not use.

A page may have hundreds of alternatives. To prevent a publicly available tool from generating unlimited external requests in a single query, return-tag checking is limited to five pages and a 12-second time budget on the same protocol, domain, and port; the syntax of the first 500 link tag on the homepage is still checked.
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