Redirect Chain Checker, See Every Hop

A URL that redirects through several hops before reaching its actual destination is invisible in a normal browser, since browsers silently follow every redirect automatically and only show you the final page. That invisibility is exactly the problem: a chain of three or four redirects behaves fine most of the time, but wastes crawl budget, adds real latency, and can dilute the link value passed between pages, all without any obvious symptom until it starts affecting indexing or page speed. This tool traces a URL's full redirect chain and shows every individual hop, its status code, and where it leads next, making the invisible chain fully visible.

Why a browser can't show you this directly

When a browser's own fetch or navigation encounters a redirect, it follows it automatically and by default gives JavaScript running on the page no visibility into the individual hops, only the final result, a deliberate browser security behavior, not a bug. Seeing each hop separately requires making the request with redirect following turned off at each step, reading the response's status code and Location header manually, then repeating that for the next URL in the chain. This tool does exactly that through a small server-side proxy, since a browser tab also can't read response headers from a different domain directly due to cross origin restrictions, stepping through the chain one hop at a time and reporting each one individually.

301, 302, 307, and 308, and why the type matters

Not every redirect status code means the same thing. A 301 signals a permanent move, telling search engines to transfer ranking signals to the new URL and update their index accordingly. A 302 signals a temporary redirect, historically interpreted more cautiously by search engines, ranking value is generally not fully transferred the way it is with a 301, since the implication is that the original URL will return. 307 and 308 are the HTTP/1.1-era equivalents of 302 and 301 respectively, with one meaningful technical difference, they guarantee the request method, GET, POST, and so on, is preserved across the redirect, which the older 301 and 302 codes technically leave ambiguous. This tool labels each hop with its exact status code and a plain-language explanation of what that specific code means.

Why chains accumulate without anyone noticing

Redirect chains rarely get built deliberately, they accumulate gradually. A URL gets redirected once during an early site migration, then redirected again during a later redesign, then once more when a URL structure changes, each redirect individually reasonable at the time it was added, but nobody goes back and updates the original redirect to point straight at the current final destination. The result is a URL that might redirect three or four times before landing anywhere, invisible to a normal site visitor since their browser follows the whole thing instantly, but a real, measurable cost for search engine crawlers working through a limited crawl budget, and a small but real latency cost for every real visitor too.

Cross-domain hops and redirect loops

Each hop is also checked against the domain the chain started on, a hop that crosses to a different domain is flagged distinctly, useful for confirming an intentional domain migration is working correctly, or catching an unexpected cross-domain redirect that shouldn't be there. If a chain ever loops back to a URL it already visited earlier in the same chain, an infinite redirect loop, that would otherwise never resolve, this tool detects the repeated URL immediately and stops, flagging exactly where the loop occurs rather than hanging indefinitely.

Runs through a small server-side proxy, nothing is stored

Since reading redirect headers across domains isn't possible directly from a browser tab, each hop is fetched through a small server-side proxy specifically built for this, which reads the response and hands the status and headers back to your browser without following the redirect itself, that decision stays entirely in this tool's logic. Nothing about the URLs you check is logged or stored beyond the request needed to complete the check. Once you've found a redirect chain worth fixing, our .htaccess Redirect Rule Generator can help build a corrected single-hop rule, part of the same Technical SEO Tools collection this tool belongs to.