In the last webmaster hangout with John Mueller of Google I asked him why he seems to get so many questions about hreflang when I suspect a very small percentage of sites on the web actually implement it. I then asked if he knew how many sites do implement it.
He said he once ran a study and may tweet about it if he can dig it up. But it was less than 10% he said, probably much lower. I am waiting for that tweet but until then...
So I tweeted out a poll asking SEOs how many of them have dealt with hreflang in their SEO endeavours over the past 12 months. To my surprise, 55.5% of those who responded said they did work with hreflang.
Have you worked with hreflang in your SEO work in the past 12 months?
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) August 4, 2020
There are about 1,700 responses, so it is a pretty big sample size of the SEO world (maybe).
If you are interested in the conversation I had about this with John, it starts at 45:52 mark into the video:
Forum discussion at Twitter.