Validate hreflang health now that Search Console's International Targeting report no longer exists
domain: international-seo · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Confirm expectations: Google removed the International Targeting report — including country-targeting settings and the hreflang error tab — from Search Console in September 2022 and hasn't reinstated hreflang error reporting there
Cross-check hreflang implementation using a third-party crawl or a dedicated hreflang-validation tool that fetches every URL in a cluster and confirms reciprocity (each URL lists all others, including itself)
Confirm every alternate URL in the cluster returns 200 and matches the expected language/region code format
Include x-default only once per cluster and verify it resolves to a sensible fallback page
Since Search Console can no longer flag hreflang errors directly, rely on Search Analytics filtered by country/query plus manual spot-checks across locales to catch mistargeting
Known gotchas
Don't expect any Search Console UI or API signal to flag broken hreflang anymore — errors now fail silently from a reporting standpoint, so validation must happen pre-deployment
Non-reciprocal hreflang (A points to B but B doesn't point back to A) remains the most common real-world break and is invisible unless you crawl the whole cluster together
Google still uses hreflang itself as a matching signal even though the country-targeting setting is gone — don't conflate the removed report with hreflang being deprecated
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