π Free Β· no signup Β· no app install Β· read-only
Are your language versions helping each other, or competing in the same search results?
Shopify will happily publish five languages for you. It will not tell you when the hreflang links between them are one-way, when a translated page points its canonical back at the English one, or when every language shares the same untranslated title. We fetch your home page and up to four of its language versions and check the wiring between them.
Based on publicly available data only. Informational, not legal advice.
What this checks
- Whether the home page declares hreflang at all β and whether it names itself
- Return links: page A points at B, but does B point back at A?
- x-default β the fallback for visitors none of your languages match
- Each language version's canonical: does it point at itself, or back at your main market?
- <html lang> against the hreflang code that claims that page
- Language and region codes against ISO 639-1 and ISO 3166-1 (en-uk is the classic one)
- Whether titles and meta descriptions differ from language to language, or one string is served to all of them
- Whether the URLs your hreflang tags point at actually answer
FAQ
My store is in one language. Should I run this?
There is nothing for it to find. hreflang only exists to tell search engines that two URLs are the same page in different languages β with one language there is no second URL. If you are about to turn on a second Shopify locale, run it after, not before.
Why does it say 'could not tell' when I definitely have a language switcher?
We read the HTML exactly as your server sent it and never run JavaScript. Some translation apps inject the switcher and the hreflang tags in the browser after load β Google's crawler may or may not pick those up, and we definitely cannot. Rather than guess, we mark it unknown and say why.
Does a broken hreflang setup get my store penalised?
No β Google's documentation is clear that invalid or one-way annotations are simply ignored. The cost is not a penalty, it is that Google then picks which version to show on its own, and your Spanish page can end up buried under your English one instead of ranking in Spain.
Want the language and Markets wiring fixed properly?
We are a Shopify studio. The audit is free; the fix is yours to make β or ours to ship.