Crawl and index controls
hreflang
hreflang is an annotation that tells Google which language or regional versions of a page belong together, so people get the right one.
In plain words
You can add it with link tags in the page’s head, in HTTP headers or in your sitemap.
Each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions.
Example
GEO-Score uses hreflang itself. Our pricing page exists in 10 languages; the snippet below shows part of what it declares.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://geo-score.online/pricing">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl" href="https://geo-score.online/nl/pricing">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://geo-score.online/pricing">Why it matters for AI search
Google doesn’t use hreflang to work out a page’s language; it uses algorithms for that. hreflang only tells it which versions belong together.
Alternate URLs must be fully qualified, including https://. They don’t have to be on the same domain.
What you can do
- Only list versions that really exist and are translated.
- Make every version list itself and all the others.
- Add an x-default version for visitors whose language you don’t serve.
- For PDFs and other non-HTML files, send hreflang in an HTTP Link header instead.
Often confused with
- The lang attribute
- The HTML lang attribute labels the language of one page. Google says it uses neither hreflang nor lang to detect language.
Sources
Facts and sources last checked on 19 October 2026.
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