Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that they treat hreflang found in your XML Sitemaps file and HTML code markup equally. We know it is more efficient and manageable for larger sites to use Sitemaps for hreflang. But either way – they both provide the same level and weight of signals to Google.

Of course, you want to make sure not to have them conflict with each other. We know this topic is one of the more complex SEO topics out there right now.

Here are the tweets:

They are even processed at the same time as crawling:

Forum discussion at Twitter.