International SEO and hreflang

Markdown delivery contract

Read markdown-delivery-contract.md for every task. Write a substantive .md document for every material work step and register its direct destination in the work index.md. For public-site work, apply the owner-required Markdown discovery profile across the full eligible inventory; preserve native standards and immutable evidence formats.

Lane outputs: locale-map.md; locale-verification.md (combine small related steps with stable section links). Map every HTML locale owner to its language-correct Markdown document and localized topic map. Preserve valid HTML/HTTP/XML hreflang where applicable. Markdown locale metadata is explanatory and does not replace hreflang.

Purpose

Validate reciprocal locale clusters and plan language/region targeting that reflects actual localized pages. This skill does not translate content, create markets, change canonicals, or deploy annotations.

Read references/locale-cluster-protocol.md before generating a repair plan.

Input gate

Require a URL-to-locale inventory, declared language/region intent, canonical URLs, current annotations or sitemap/header data, page accessibility, and ownership of each localized variant. Do not infer a locale from a URL slug, browser language, or translated sample alone.