Is Google showing shoppers the wrong region's page?
Selling through Shopify Markets to more than one country or language? Missing or misconfigured hreflang tags can send search engines to the wrong regional currency page, or duplicate your listings across markets. See what your homepage is actually telling Google.
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Four ways hreflang quietly breaks
We read the <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..."> tags on your homepage and check them for the mistakes that most commonly send Shopify Markets stores' traffic to the wrong page.
Whether any hreflang tags exist
Genuinely fine if you sell in one market and one language — this isn't a failure for you. But if you're running Shopify Markets across multiple regions or currencies, having zero hreflang tags is a real gap.
x-default entry
x-default tells search engines what to show visitors whose language or region doesn't match any of your listed locale alternates. Without it, that decision is left entirely to the search engine.
Duplicate language/region codes
Each locale code should appear once. Duplicates confuse which URL is actually canonical for that language or region.
Malformed hreflang entries
Each href value should be a full, absolute URL. Missing or relative hrefs mean search engines can't reliably follow the alternate.
Markets sets this up for you — until it doesn't
Shopify Markets adds hreflang tags, canonical URLs, and locale-aware sitemap behavior automatically when it's properly configured. That's genuinely one of the best reasons to use it for international expansion. But theme customizations, a partial Markets rollout, or a market added after the theme was last touched can leave the hreflang output broken without anything visibly wrong on the storefront.
When that happens, search engines can index the wrong regional or currency page for a given shopper — showing a US visitor your EUR pricing, or ranking a duplicate instead of the correct localized URL. The store still looks fine to you; the damage shows up as lost international traffic you never notice going missing.
What correct hreflang does for an international store
Shoppers land on the right page
Search engines send visitors to the regional or currency page that actually matches their language and location, instead of guessing.
Less international duplicate-content dilution
Clean hreflang tells search engines your regional pages are locale variants of one another, not competing duplicate content.
Catches a broken Markets setup early
Misconfiguration is easy to miss because nothing looks wrong on the storefront itself — this check surfaces it before it costs international traffic.
A pre-launch check for new markets
Run it before you expand into a new region or language to confirm the new market's hreflang output is actually correct.
Three steps, about ten seconds
Paste your store URL
Any public storefront works — yourstore.com or the myshopify.com address. No login, no install, no admin access.
We read your homepage's hreflang tags
Our scanner reads your public storefront the same way a search engine does. A store with no hreflang tags isn't automatically "failing" — it only becomes relevant once you're selling to multiple regions or languages.
Get your score & full report
Your score and top issue appear instantly. Unlock the full issue-by-issue report — with a specific fix for each finding — with your email.
Common questions
My store only sells in one country — do I need hreflang tags?
No. This check reports "no hreflang tags found" as informational, not a failure, for single-market stores. Hreflang only matters once you're serving more than one language or region.
What does x-default actually do?
It's the fallback page shown to visitors whose language/region doesn't match any of your listed locale alternates. Omitting it leaves that fallback decision entirely to the search engine.
Can this check confirm reciprocal hreflang tags across all my regional pages?
Not currently — it validates the tags found on the single URL you scan (syntax, duplicates, x-default), not full cross-page reciprocity across every regional URL.
Does Shopify Markets set this up automatically?
Mostly yes, when properly configured. But theme customizations or a partial Markets setup can still break it — this scan is a quick way to verify the output rather than trust the configuration blindly.
Expanding into new markets or fixing a broken Markets setup? International SEO and localization work is part of our store optimization service.