Check whether your page declares its language at all, and how many hreflang alternates it offers. The first thing to get right before any international rollout.
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This reads the lang attribute on the html element and counts the hreflang alternates the page declares. Those are two different jobs. lang states what language this page is written in, which is the baseline every page needs. hreflang declares that other language or country versions of the same page exist and where they are, which only applies once you actually have them.
A missing lang attribute is a small tag with a wide blast radius: screen readers use it to choose a voice, browsers use it to offer translation, and search engines use it as one input when deciding which audience a page suits. hreflang is what stops your German page competing against your English one for the same customer, and what stops a search engine serving the wrong currency and the wrong shipping promise to someone ready to buy.
No lang attribute is a warning and worth fixing in the template today, because it is one attribute and it applies to every page. No hreflang is reported as information, not a fault, because a single language site should not have any. If you do run multiple versions, the rule that breaks most implementations is reciprocity: every version must list every other version including itself, and one page that does not point back invalidates the set.
Reciprocity is the rule that breaks most hreflang implementations and it cannot be checked from a single URL. The audit reads the alternates, follows them, and reports whether the set agrees with itself, which is the difference between an implementation that works and one that is being discarded whole.
A two-language set where one side was added later, by a different template. This is the failure that silently disables an entire implementation.
The English page names both versions. The German page names only itself. That breaks reciprocity, and a set whose members do not agree with each other is discarded rather than partially honoured — so the correct half is thrown away with the incorrect half and the site behaves as though hreflang was never added. The usual cause is exactly this: one language rendered by a template that was updated and one by a template that was not.
<!-- on /en/ -->
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/">
<!-- on /de/ -->
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/">en-GB, not gb.No. Declaring lang on the html element is enough. Adding hreflang to a site with nothing to alternate between creates work and a source of errors with no upside.
The version to serve when no declared language or region matches the visitor. Usually a language selector or the international English page. It is optional but it is the difference between a sensible fallback and an arbitrary one.
Almost always because the return links are missing. Every alternate must point back to every other alternate. Search engines discard sets that do not agree, which means one broken template can silently disable the whole implementation.
Written up properly, for the question a result usually raises next.
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