Multilingual content

Translations make the package speak your language. This page is about the other half: making the package understand the language of your content. A 60-character title limit is wrong for Japanese, a word-boundary cut breaks Thai, İstanbul and istanbul are the same word in Turkish, an it_IT hreflang is invalid, and a Korean site cares about Naver's crawler, not only Google's. None of that is translation — it is correctness, and it is decided in the core so every surface agrees.

Nothing here needs configuring to work. Every rule below has a sensible built-in value and a config knob under config/seo.php.

Title and description budgets per script

Google shows roughly 600 px of title and 920 px of description on a desktop result. "60 / 160 characters" is that budget for Latin text. A full-width CJK glyph is about twice as wide, so the same budget is ~30 / ~80 characters of Japanese, Chinese or Korean — a 45-character Japanese title is already cut where a 45-character English one is fine.

Rankbeam\Seo\I18n\LengthPolicy decides the budget for the text in front of it:

use Rankbeam\Seo\I18n\LengthPolicy;

$policy = LengthPolicy::for($title, $locale);   // detects the dominant script
$policy->script;          // 'cjk'
$policy->titleMax;        // 30
$policy->descriptionMax;  // 80
$policy->length($title);  // user-perceived characters (graphemes)
$policy->titleTooLong($title);

It is what the editor warnings (SEOWarningEvaluator), the free seo:audit, the computed-description truncation, the Pro scan and the Filament counters read, so the counter under the field, the audit finding and the scan issue can never disagree. Lengths are counted in graphemes — a Thai syllable with its vowel marks, a Devanagari conjunct or an emoji with a skin tone each count as one, the unit an editor sees and search engines effectively budget.

The rows live in seo.length_policy, keyed by script bucket (latin, cyrillic, greek, cjk, thai, arabic, hebrew, devanagari) with default for every bucket not listed. A row may set only some keys and inherit the rest:

'length_policy' => [
    'default' => ['title_min' => 30, 'title_max' => 60, 'description_min' => 70, 'description_max' => 160],
    'cjk'     => ['title_min' => 15, 'title_max' => 30, 'description_min' => 35, 'description_max' => 80],
    'thai'    => ['title_max' => 55],   // everything else from `default`
],

Only cjk differs by default. An upgraded install with an older published config gets the built-in cjk row without touching anything.

Mixed titles

Detection is a weighted letter count: a CJK glyph counts double, so "Laravel SEO の完全ガイド" resolves to CJK while "Laravel SEO for the 東京 developer" stays Latin. A value with no letters at all (a year, a price) takes the script of the page locale.

The SEOWarningEvaluator::TITLE_MAX_LENGTH / DESCRIPTION_MAX_LENGTH constants still exist as the Latin defaults, for code that reads them.

Grapheme-safe, script-aware truncation

A computed description (seo.computed.description_max_length, a Latin budget) is scaled by the policy — a CJK description gets half — and cut by Rankbeam\Seo\I18n\Truncator:

• text with word spaces keeps the historical rule: the last word boundary within the limit (if it is at least 60 % into the limit), no ellipsis, trailing punctuation trimmed — byte-identical to before for Latin text;
• Han, Kana and Thai have no word spaces, so the cut prefers the last sentence or clause mark (。！？、，…) inside the limit, then a space if the text has any (Korean), then a hard cut;
• slicing happens on grapheme clusters, so a cut can never land inside a combining sequence — a Thai vowel mark or an emoji modifier is never separated from its base.

Locale-aware casing

mb_strtolower() is locale-blind. Rankbeam\Seo\I18n\CaseFolder is not:

use Rankbeam\Seo\I18n\CaseFolder;

CaseFolder::lower('İSTANBUL', 'tr');            // "istanbul" — dotted İ → i under Turkish rules
CaseFolder::equals('ΟΔΟΣ', 'οδός', 'el');       // true — final sigma folded
CaseFolder::equals('Straße', 'STRASSE', 'de');  // true — ß folded to ss
CaseFolder::containsWord('Notizie dalla Città', 'città'); // true — Unicode word boundaries

lower() is the display form; fold(), equals(), contains() and containsWord() are for comparisons. The core uses it for the brand-aware title suffix skip (seo.title_suffix_skip_when_contains), so a Turkish brand matches in either i form and an accented brand gets a real word boundary; the Pro keyword checks build on the same helper.

hreflang

Google reads language[-Script][-REGION] — ISO 639-1 language, optional ISO 15924 script, optional ISO 3166-1 (or UN M.49) region — plus x-default. Laravel apps tend to hand over their locale instead (it_IT, pt_br), and an underscore is not valid there. Three policies in seo.hreflang apply to a model's getSEOAlternates() list before it becomes <link rel="alternate"> tags, sitemap <xhtml:link> entries, llms.txt links and audit input — one list, seen identically everywhere:

'hreflang' => [
    'normalize'    => true,   // it_IT → it-IT, zh_hans_cn → zh-Hans-CN
    'include_self' => false,  // append the page itself when the list omits it
    'x_default'    => null,   // e.g. 'en': duplicate that language's alternate as x-default
],

• normalize (on by default) rewrites every code to its BCP 47 form. Turn it off to emit codes exactly as returned.
• include_self appends the page's own locale + canonical when neither its URL nor its code is in the list. Google requires each language version to list itself; turn this on when your hook returns only the other languages.
• x_default names the language whose alternate is duplicated as x-default when the list has none.

An empty list stays empty — a page with no translations gets neither a self-reference nor an x-default.

The free audit adds three checks on the policy-applied list:

Code	Severity	Meaning
hreflang_invalid_code	warning	A code search engines ignore (en-UK, jp, english).
hreflang_duplicate_code	notice	The same code listed twice.
hreflang_missing_self	warning	The page's own URL is not in its list.

Reciprocity (does the other page point back?) needs a crawl; that is the Pro scan's job. The helper is public if you need it:

use Rankbeam\Seo\I18n\Hreflang;

Hreflang::fromLocale(app()->getLocale()); // 'it_IT' → 'it-IT'
Hreflang::isValid('pt-BR');               // true
Hreflang::isValid('en-UK');               // false

inLanguage in the schema graph

The WebPage node carries inLanguage from the page's resolved locale (it_IT → it-IT), and ArticleSchema::fromModel() takes it from the stored seo_meta locale. The WebSite node takes its languages from config:

'schema' => [
    'in_language' => true,                       // off = no inLanguage anywhere
    'website' => ['inLanguage' => ['it', 'en']], // one code or a list
],

Regional search engines

The crawler catalog behind seo:robots-txt now carries the classic web search crawlers that matter outside the Google/Bing world — Yandex, Baidu, Naver (Yeti), Seznam, Sogou, 360, Cốc Cốc and DuckDuckGo — tagged with the purpose search_engine, allowed by default. They take part in the policy and the per-bot overrides, so a shop that does not serve China can keep two crawlers off its bandwidth:

'ai_crawlers' => [
    'policy'    => ['search_engine' => 'allow', /* … */],
    'overrides' => ['baiduspider' => 'disallow', 'sogou' => 'disallow'],
],

SEO::aiCrawlers()->all() and match() stay AI-only (the Pro AI-bot log and every "N AI crawlers" count are unchanged); ask for the engines with searchEngines(), all(true) or match($ua, true). See AI crawler control.

Baidu

Support for the crawler and the verification tag says nothing about ranking: real Baidu visibility needs hosting in China and an ICP licence.

Site verification

Ownership tokens render as one meta tag per configured engine, on every page (Google accepts the tag anywhere; Yandex, Baidu and Naver look on the root page, which is covered). Nothing is emitted for a key you leave empty:

'verification' => [
    'google'    => env('SEO_VERIFY_GOOGLE'),    // google-site-verification
    'bing'      => env('SEO_VERIFY_BING'),      // msvalidate.01
    'yandex'    => env('SEO_VERIFY_YANDEX'),    // yandex-verification
    'baidu'     => env('SEO_VERIFY_BAIDU'),     // baidu-site-verification
    'naver'     => env('SEO_VERIFY_NAVER'),     // naver-site-verification
    'seznam'    => env('SEO_VERIFY_SEZNAM'),    // seznam-wmt
    'pinterest' => env('SEO_VERIFY_PINTEREST'), // p:domain_verify
    'facebook'  => env('SEO_VERIFY_FACEBOOK'),  // facebook-domain-verification
],

A value may be a list of tokens (Google issues one per property owner).

OG images in every script

The bundled card font covers Latin, Cyrillic and Greek. Every other script depends on a font installed on the machine that runs seo:og-images — nothing else is bundled, because a CJK font is 16 MB+. The templates now carry a per-script fallback stack (seo.og_image.font_stack, with the page language's Noto CJK family moved to the front so Han characters take the right national glyph forms), and the command warns, once per script, when the host has no font for a title it is about to render:

No installed font covers cjk text — its cards will render as boxes. Install one: apt-get install fonts-noto-cjk

On Debian/Ubuntu: apt-get install fonts-noto-cjk fonts-noto-core fonts-noto-color-emoji. Details in Generated OG images.

llms.txt in several languages

With seo.llms_txt.alternates on, a page that exists in other languages ends its bullet with Also in: [it](…), [de](…) — the policy-applied alternates minus x-default and the page itself. Off by default.

Unicode URLs

Rankbeam never slugs or rewrites your URLs, so a path such as /città/ or /検索 survives every artifact untouched. Canonicals with an IDN host (https://münchen.example/) or a Unicode or percent-encoded path are accepted by the audit (Rankbeam\Seo\I18n\Url::isValid() replaces PHP's ASCII-only FILTER_VALIDATE_URL). Keep one form per URL — raw Unicode or percent-encoded, not both — so canonical, hreflang and sitemap entries compare equal byte for byte.

What the other packages add

• laravel-seo-filament reads the same length policy for the live counters and the SERP preview.
• laravel-seo-pro reads it for the scan's title_length / description_length checks and the AI-assist prompts; per-language analysis (segmentation, stemming, readability formulas, keyword matching) is the next step of the program.