Phantom strong tags in wordpress

You most likely haven’t correctly closed a <strong> tag somewhere. This is the browser’s attempt to resolve that problem.

If you look at the raw HTML source by right clicking then View Page Source (not Inspect Element) you should be able to see if there’s a <strong> tag with a missing or misspelled </strong> tag.

The HTML structure you see in the Inspector tab is not the actual HTML that was received from the server, it’s a document tree reconstructed by the browser based on that HTML. If you have errors in the original HTML, like missing closing tags, then the browser will be forced to find a way to fix that error so that it can create a valid DOM. This can lead to things like phantom tags.