Shopify Hreflang Auditing and Best Practices

If you are selling into multiple countries or languages through Shopify, hreflang configuration and monitoring are essential.

Shopify generates some hreflang signals for you; others must be managed manually, and some cannot be fixed at all. This guide walks through Shopify hreflang auditing and best practices, with a clear focus on what works, what breaks, and what you can realistically control.

What are Shopify hreflang tags?

Hreflang tags on Shopify are ‘labels’ in a page’s section that tell Google that the specific page has a version in a different language for different countries, each with its own URL.

Let’s take our company’s website as an example. Following our recent expansion in the UK, we aim to deliver value to UK Shopify merchants by tailoring our blog content, especially to the UK language and market-specific needs.

Hreflang ensures that the page with the En_Gb extension is shown to users searching from a UK-based location.

According to Google’s official documentation on hreflang, the hreflang attribute’s value consists of one or, optionally, two values, separated by a dash.

For example, en-GB in the example above. The first code of the hreflang attribute is the language code (in ISO 639-1 format), followed by an optional second code that represents the region code (in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format)

Why does hreflang matter for Shopify?

There are two sides to what hreflang does for Shopify, all related to your site’s ability to convert.

• SEO discoverability

Hreflang helps ensure (but does not guarantee) that each market site (if you’re using Shopify Markets) is optimized for local search. No matter how well-ranked your store is for your local market or how well-known the brand is, it’s hard to compete with local businesses that have been serving the market you want to head into.

• Content relevance

Continuing the example of our website. We know that Shopify stores in the UK have different pain points than our customers in the US; thus, the content must match the search intent.

This applies beyond traditional search. LLMs increasingly prioritize relevance over domain authority. If you want your products to be indexed by ChatGPT and Google’s AI overview in different markets, hreflang plays a big role in helping you succeed.

What hreflang does:

• Help Google understand relationships between equivalent pages across languages and regions
• Prevents different market versions from competing against each other in search results.

What hreflang doesn’t do:

• Google doesn’t guarantee it will obey hreflang, and Google doesn’t use hreflang to detect language; it uses its own algorithms.

This means it’s not guaranteed that hreflang alone will show the French version of your page to French users. In fact, it’s not uncommon, and you probably noticed that when you search for a store (yours as well) in another region using a VPN, the ‘.com’ version is still prevalent.

Google’s official tutorial on localization covers the topic of indexing more in-depth

• Hreflang doesn’t automatically give a ranking boost on its own. It helps, but content relevance and following today’s best practices come first.

Put simply, Shopify hreflang tags improve clarity for Google and LLM crawlers, but don’t favour the content of your site over another.

• Fix untranslated or duplicated content on your site.

If all language versions contain the duplicate English content, Google will ignore hreflang.

What you can and can’t control with Shopify hreflang

You can only ‘suggest’ to Google by putting a convincing argument with your content, technical, and non-technical SEO efforts.

How does hreflang tie with Shopify Markets?

Shopify markets help with country-specific domains or subfolders with automatic hreflang SEO tags so each market’s site is optimized for local search. When Markets is configured correctly, Shopify outputs hreflang automatically for:

• Product pages
• Collections
• CMS pages
• Blog posts

As of July 2026, this automatic behavior is no longer all-or-nothing. Go to Online Store > Preferences, then Social sharing and SEO, and you will find an Automatic hreflang tags setting, on by default.

Turn it off if your theme or an app already outputs its own hreflang tags. Running both at once creates duplicate tags, which does more damage to your international rankings than having no hreflang at all.

If Shopify markets handles hreflang tags automatically, is there a need for an audit?

Because hreflang only works when everything else agrees. Shopify Markets generates hreflang tags, but neither validates them nor prevents conflicting SEO signals. While Google evaluates hreflang only after checking:

• Canonical URLs
• Redirect chains
• Indexability
• Language consistency
• URL parity across markets

You could be setting up a localized global storefront the right way, but Google can still show the wrong market version in search.

A Shopify hreflang audit verifies that:

• Every hreflang URL is indexable
• All hreflang references are reciprocal
• Canonicals match the hreflang target URL
• X-default ( the fallback page when no language or region match applies, usually the main .com or selector page).is present and points to the correct fallback
• No hreflang links point to redirected, blocked, or non-canonical pages
• Language and country codes match the URL structure Markets created

Running a Shopify hreflang audit

1. Check indexability first (foundation)
Before evaluating hreflang, confirm Google can index each market URL. If a page isn’t indexable, hreflang will be ignored. Pick one product page and one collection page and go through the following steps.

1. Open the Page Source for the Collection and Product Page
2. Search for
3. Make sure it is set to “INDEX, FOLLOW”

If the robots is set to NOINDEX then the Bots will ignore the page and it will not get crawled and indexed.

2. Check canonicals vs hreflang (critical)
Canonical conflicts invalidate hreflang. If canonicals disagree with hreflang, Google follows the canonical.

1. Open the page source
2. Search for Canonical tag
3. Make sure it does send to the same market
4. BAD EXAMPLE: The /en site has a canonical link to the /de site XX

3. Check hreflang on live pages
Now, validate hreflang itself. Let’s use the same product page and collection page to confirm:

• All regional variants reference each other.
• Self-referencing hreflang exists
• Language–region codes are valid (en-GB, not en_UK)
• No missing, broken, or redirected hreflang URLs

Use online tools to check the hreflang presence. Online tools like Hreflangchecker might help check the presence of hreflang tags on the site and even provide suggestions on what to implement and how. Simple yet effective.

4. Validate with Google-recommended tools
Use Google-aligned validators to catch structural issues and check for

• Missing return tags
• Incorrect language or country codes
• Non-indexable hreflang URLs
• Canonical conflicts reported by the tool

Geolocation redirects are a risk to hreflang setups

Here's the failure mode: a theme or a third-party geolocation app detects a visitor's country by IP and redirects them straight to the matching market URL. This works for real shoppers. It breaks for Googlebot, which crawls almost exclusively from US IP addresses.

If Googlebot hits yourstore.com/de/products/jacket and gets redirected to yourstore.com/products/jacket before it can read the page, the /de version is never crawled and never indexed. Every hreflang tag pointing to it becomes dead weight, hreflang can't help a page Google never reaches. 

Shopify's own Geolocation app was removed from the App Store in February 2025, and Shopify's native Markets redirection is built to exclude crawlers by default. But plenty of stores still run a third-party geolocation, popup, or redirect app on top of Markets, and not all of them exclude bots the same way.

Before anything else in your audit: crawl your store with a crawler set to the Googlebot user agent and confirm every market URL returns a 200, not a redirect. If a market page redirects the crawler the way it redirects a real visitor, fix that first. Nothing downstream in this audit matters until it's resolved.

Common hreflang issues

A study by Ahrefs of over 370,000 domains found that the most common hreflang issue by far is ‘Pages missing x-default’, followed by missing referring hreflang tabs and broken pages.

Here’s precisely what the study found, and you will likely face with Shopify as well.

• Pages missing x-default – 56.3%
• Pages missing self-referencing hreflang tags – 18%
• Hreflang tags reference redirected or broken pages – 16.9%
• Pages missing reciprocal tags – 15.3%
• Hreflang tags pointing to non-canonical URLs – 8%
• Pages with incorrect hreflang values – 4.6%
• Pages with inconsistent language attributes – 3.2%
• More than one page referenced for the same language – 2.5%
• The same page referenced for more than one language -2.5%

Shopify hreflang troubleshooter

Use the Shopify hreflang troubleshooter below to find a solution to your problem. Choose the most common Shopify-specific Hrelang issue from the dropdown to display the solution.

Conclusion: Run a full multilingual SEO + Markets audit

You are set for localization. As discussed above, hreflang only helps with rankings indirectly. The direct impact comes from your SEO strategy, your site’s performance, and your 2026 readiness for AI search.