Locale content is actually translatedWhat it checks and how to fix it

What it checks

Compares the visible text of pages that declare each other as different-language hreflang alternates. Any pair that is 90% or more similar is flagged as probably untranslated (warning); the check passes when every compared pair is clearly different, and is skipped when the audit found no cross-language pairs.

Why it matters

A "/de/" page that still carries the English body copy is not a German page: it competes with the original as a near-duplicate and gives German searchers nothing. Google can treat large sets of such pages as duplicate or scaled low-value content, which can drag down the whole site rather than just the affected URLs.

How to fix it

Translate the full main content of each flagged page: the title, headings and body, not only the navigation and footer. A locale that has no translated content yet should not be published or listed in hreflang until it does.

While a locale is unfinished, remove it from the hreflang set and keep it out of the index:

<!-- on the untranslated /de/ page -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

and drop its entry from the alternates of the other locales:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/pricing">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://example.com/fr/tarifs">
<!-- no hreflang="de" line until the German page is translated -->

The check is a text-similarity heuristic, so review each flagged pair: short pages made mostly of product names or code can be legitimately similar.