- Short answer
- Only if you already manage hreflang yourself — Shopify warns that turning the automatic tags off otherwise can hurt your SEO.
- Where the setting lives
- Online Store → Preferences, in the Social sharing image and SEO section; added July 10, 2026, on by default
- The condition Shopify documents
- Managing the tags yourself — Shopify's example is a theme or app that already adds hreflang tags
- If you turn it off anyway
- Shopify warns it can negatively affect your SEO unless an alternative implementation is in place
- How to spot duplicates
- No Shopify page we have found documents a check (read August 9, 2026) — the same hreflang code twice
What Shopify generates, and where the setting lives
Shopify generates these tags "automatically based on your market and language configuration", and only for markets that have a distinct domain, subdomain or subfolder. So what they point at follows how Markets builds your localised URLs.
The switch itself is in Online Store → Preferences, added July 10, 2026 and on by default — an untouched store is already emitting them.
The case Shopify documents for turning them off
Shopify documents it as managing the tags yourself, "such as using a theme or an app that adds hreflang tags" — its example, not the whole list — so the automatic ones can go and no duplicates appear.
Its theme documentation explains why: your own tags on top of the automatic ones "can produce duplicate or conflicting annotations, which can hurt your store's search ranking".
Check before you turn them off
Without that replacement, Shopify's warning is blunt:
Turning off automatic hreflang tags can negatively affect your store's SEO. Turn off this setting only if you have an alternative hreflang tag implementation in place.
What replaces them, Shopify says plainly: its international-domains page tells you to add your own hreflang tags to your theme. If you do not, the mechanism leaves only one reading: with the setting off and nothing else emitting the tags, those pages carry no hreflang at all. No Shopify page we have found — its international SEO page, its international-domains hreflang page and its theme hreflang docs, read on August 9, 2026 — tells merchants how to inspect a page for duplicate tags.
Check first: open a localised page's source and read its hreflang tags. Shopify also adds an x-default tag pointing at your primary domain, so your primary domain's URL appearing twice is normal. The duplicate is the same hreflang code on two tags.
This article was written entirely by AI under human editorial direction. The editor sets the topic and structure, runs multi-stage validation on facts, links, and interactive elements, and verifies the output is useful from a business perspective. All claims are checked against official Shopify sources. Details may change — always confirm critical data at shopify.com.
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