What is hreflang, and does my site need it?
Only if your site exists in more than one language or region. hreflang is a set of links on a page saying "this same page also exists in German, here" — so a machine that finds one version can find the others and hand each reader the right one.
What it actually is
A site translated into several languages has several pages that say the same thing. Without a label, those pages look like near-duplicates that happen to be in different languages. hreflang is the label: each version lists its siblings and the language, and optionally the region, each one is written for, using the same standard language codes the rest of the web uses.
Why it matters
It lets the right version reach the right person. An assistant answering a question in Spanish can cite your Spanish page instead of translating your English one on the fly; a search engine can show the German page in Germany. Without it, the versions compete with each other, and a reader can land on a language they do not speak.
What good looks like
Every language version lists the full set, using valid language codes — a hyphen between language and region, never an underscore — and often a fallback for readers who match none of them. The sets agree with each other, so whichever version a machine finds first, it can reach all the rest.
Being honest about it
If your site is in one language, this does not apply and we leave it off your report entirely. When it does apply, there is a limit to what a single page can prove: we can see whether your codes are valid, but whether every other version links back is a question about pages we did not fetch, so we do not pretend to answer it. We also do not demand that a page list itself, because neither the HTML standard nor the linking standard requires it.
Where most sites go wrong
The most common failure we find is a malformed code, such as an underscore where a hyphen belongs or a region tacked onto the wrong part, which machines discard silently, so the effort did nothing. The second is drift: a new language version added without updating the others, so half the set points to pages that no longer list them back.
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