Language and locale signals

Language and locale signals is check B4 in the fifteen-point audit. lang is set, and multilingual sites publish a reciprocal hreflang cluster with an x-default.

What counts as evidence

The lang attribute and the hreflang links we found, including whether each cluster is reciprocal.

How to fix it

Make every page in a cluster link to all the others including itself, then add x-default for the fallback.

Where this sits

B is the group: accessibility, comprehension, or extractability. The groups run in order — a crawler that cannot reach the page never reaches the reading checks — so fix the earliest failing group first. The full definition of all fifteen items is in the standard.