Auditing International Implementation with Sitebulb
International SEO relies on accurate hreflang and HTML lang setup to ensure search engines serve the right language and regional version of your pages. Sitebulb’s International Report makes it easy to audit, validate, and troubleshoot these configurations across your site.
This guide explains how to check the presence and validity of hreflang and HTML lang implementation using Sitebulb.
Finding key International Implementation data
International Report
Prerequisite - Enable the International Report
To gather International data, you’ll need to make sure that your International Report is enabled. To build your International Report, Sitebulb will crawl your entire site, including alternate URLs found in HTML, HTTP headers, or XML sitemaps, to find and audit international hreflang and HTML annotation.
Enable your International report under Audit Settings > Audit Data:
If your hreflang markup is set up in sitemaps, you should also enable ‘XML Sitemaps’ as a Crawl Source during setup, to ensure that these tags can be found and analysed by Sitebulb.
You will also want to ensure that Sitebulb can crawl the whole website, and is not limited to specific folders or paths, so it can report on the relationships between your hreflang tags (reciprocation).
Verify Hreflang Implementation
To check whether hreflang tags are implemented across your site, navigate to the International Report. The top metrics provide you with a breakdown of the presence of hreflang across your site:
URLs with hreflang - pages that contain at least one hreflang annotation.
URLs missing hreflang - pages with no outgoing or incoming hreflang tags.
The hreflang coverage is also visually presented in the URLs graph, which you will find by scrolling down on your International report overview. This graph shows the distribution of URLs missing hreflang vs URLs with hreflang across the site.
Verify Hreflang validity
Sitebulb automatically validates all hreflang annotations as it discovers them. Any URLs that fail this validation will be flagged under the following International Hints:
Sitebulb also automatically checks reciprocation. When it finds an outgoing hreflang link, it crawls the target URL to confirm that it points back to the original URL. Pages missing reciprocal hreflang tags will be flagged under the International Hint:
At the top of your International Report, you’ll also find the Hreflang Geotargeting tab, which aggregates the international data to provide you with an overview of the validity of each hreflang tag, the number of URLs targeted, and the most prevalent issues, such as missing return tags and hreflang annotations pointing to redirected or broken URLs.
You will also find all URLs affected by these issues flagged up under the relevant International Hints, like:
The International Data Export
To dig further into the data presented in the International Report, download the International Data Export.
The export gathers the data into a set of spreadsheets that allows you to dig further into the coverage and validity of your hreflang implementation.
The Hreflang Cluster Matrix sheet gives you a bird’s-eye view of your hreflang implementation.
It shows every URL Sitebulb has discovered with hreflang or HTML lang annotations, along with all the language-region variations that should exist for those pages.
Each row represents a unique URL found by Sitebulb.
Each column represents a language-region combination found in your hreflang markup.
Inside the grid, Sitebulb shows whether a page variation exists for each URL under each language-region pair with a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ value.
By scanning this sheet, you can immediately see where coverage is incomplete — for instance, if a product page exists in English, German, and Spanish but is missing a French version.
The URL Cluster matrix sheet gives you this same information, but shows the actual alternative URL for each language-region, where available.
The ‘Invalid Incoming Annotations’ and ‘Invalid Outgoing Annotations’ sheets contain every URL with invalid annotations alongside the respective URLs containing the invalid tags.
HTML Lang Implementation
Sitebulb also gathers and validates HTML lang attributes found on each page and checks these for consistency against the hreflang implementation.
You will find the HTML Lang attribute coverage in the same URLs graph as the Hreflang coverage, in the International Report overview.
Just like with hreflang, Sitebulb automatically validates all HTML Lang annotations as it discovers them. Any URLs that fail this validation will be flagged under the following International Hint:
Sitebulb will also verify that the language and location declarations match, and flag any failing URLs under the International Hint:
Next Steps
This Article works in conjunction with Sitebulb's Technical SEO Auditing template. Continue your technical SEO auditing journey by following the step-by-step articles below.
Auditing Indexability & Crawlability
Auditing On Page Elements
Auditing Performance & Mobile Friendly
Auditing Structured Data
Auditing Internationalization
Auditing Security Issues
Auditing International Implementation Video Guidance (short how-tos)
Video Guidance - Training Session
Watch the recording for the latest Sitebulb training session on auditing International Implementation with Sitebulb.