International SEO
Hreflang Reciprocity & Return-Tag Checker
Paste the hreflang link tags from every page in your language/region cluster (or a hreflang sitemap) and find missing return tags, conflicting targets and x-default mistakes — the single most common reason Google silently ignores hreflang annotations.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste here is sent anywhere except an anonymized usage count.
One block per page, starting with "PAGE: https://your-url/" followed by that page's <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..." href="..."> tags (you can paste its whole <head> — everything else is ignored). A pasted hreflang sitemap (<url><loc>...</loc> with <xhtml:link> tags) is auto-detected instead, no "PAGE:" markers needed.
How reciprocity works, and how to fix common mistakes
Hreflang is a hint, not a command, and Google explicitly requires it to be reciprocal: if page A has a hreflang link to page B, page B must have a hreflang link back to page A. If the return tag is missing, Google discards the whole annotation for that pair — often silently, which is why this mistake survives in production for years. This tool builds the link graph from everything you paste and checks every pair.
x-default marks the fallback page shown to visitors whose language does not match any of your variants. Every page in the cluster should declare the same x-default target — if some pages point to a different URL, or omit it entirely, browsers and Google Search see an inconsistent cluster.
Language codes use a hyphen, never an underscore ("en-US", not "en_US"). The classic trap is hreflang="uk" — "uk" is the ISO 639-1 code for Ukrainian, not the United Kingdom; for British English use "en-gb". Codes should follow language[-script][-region], e.g. "zh-Hant-TW".
Every page should also include a hreflang entry pointing to itself (a self-reference) — Google's own documentation calls this out as a required part of a correct cluster, and its absence is a common sign the tags were copy-pasted without updating.
Limits: this tool only sees the pages you paste — it does not crawl your site, so a link to a page you did not include is reported as "unverified", not broken. hreflang values must be absolute https:// URLs; relative paths are ignored by search engines. rel="alternate" must be present on every hreflang <link> or it is ignored entirely.