Sitemap Hreflang Not In Source Code But In Dev Tools Inspect

[JinKazama]

Our site is implementing hreflang through XML sitemaps.

If I open any of the sitemaps and view source in the browser, I cannot see any of the hreflang implementation, only the list of pages for that locale

But, if i use dev tools to inspect the sitemap, I can find the full hreflang markup

Is this a problem? Will google and bing still be able to see the hreflang markup in the sitemaps if it's not in the initial page code?

[tangor]

@JinKazama ... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

Is there a specific reason why hreflang is NOT on every page of the site?

Sitemap is not even required, thus has ZERO impact on "site wide declarations" intended for EACH PAGE.

[not2easy]

That is acceptable markup, to only show the hreflang in a sitemap, but if there are separate language pages you may also need canonical metadata or sitemaps. Their instructions are here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions#sitemap and they have a troubleshooting section there to help you find any possible errors.

(the link contains a # so it would need to be copied and pasted to your browser's address bar)

[JinKazama]

Thanks, the hreflang code looks correct, with links to each variant including a self-referencing link, plus each page has a self-referencing canonical tag

My question is more around whether search engines can properly crawl this information as it's not found whhen I look at the initial source code, but IS found when I inspect the page with dev tools

[not2easy]

If you inspect a given URL using GSC, does that indicate the hreflang properties? What you see could possibly be based on your browser's language preference.