Free Tool · Technical SEO

Redirect Checker

Trace every hop in a redirect chain — 301, 302, 307 and 308 — with status codes, HTTPS checks, loop detection and fix guidance for chains that waste crawl budget and link equity. Free, no signup.

Free · No signup · Runs in your browser · Updated

Full URLs or bare domains both work.

What this redirect checker traces

  • Every hop in the redirect chain, in order — with the HTTP status code (301, 302, 307, 308) and Location header for each response.
  • HTTPS on every hop, so you can spot chains that bounce through insecure http:// URLs.
  • Redirect loops, long chains, temporary redirects on permanent moves, and chains that dead-end in a 404 — flagged as plain-English warnings.

The check runs from our servers, so you see the chain exactly as a crawler sees it — not what your browser cache or extensions show you.

A redirect checker traces the path a URL actually takes before it settles on a final page — every 301, 302, 307 and 308 hop, the HTTP status code and Location header at each step, whether each hop runs over HTTPS, and what the final URL returns. Paste any URL or bare domain into this redirect chain checker and it follows the whole chain from our servers — the same way Googlebot does — then renders it as a hop-by-hop timeline with a summary of the redirect count, final status and final content type. It's free, requires no signup, and results appear in your browser in a couple of seconds.

Redirects fail quietly, and the failures are expensive. A migration that stacks http → https → www → trailing-slash becomes a three-hop chain that slows every visit and wastes crawl budget. A 302 left on a permanent move tells Google the old URL is coming back, so it keeps the wrong URL indexed. A chain that dead-ends in a 404 throws away every backlink pointing at the original URL. And a redirect loop takes the page down completely — browsers give up with ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS and crawlers abandon the URL. None of these show up when you just load the page; the browser hides the hops. Checking the raw HTTP headers per hop is the only way to see them.

Use this URL redirect checker whenever you touch redirect rules: after a migration, before launching a campaign URL, or when auditing the legacy URLs your best backlinks still point at. It's the one-URL-at-a-time version of what Black & Gold SEO runs across your entire site — crawling every URL, flagging every chain, loop and misused 302, and shipping the fixes rather than just listing them.

How to use it

  1. 1

    Paste the URL you want to trace

    A full URL or a bare domain both work — the tool normalizes it and follows the chain. The highest-value URLs to check: old URLs from a site migration, the targets of your strongest backlinks, campaign/short links, and every http:// and www/non-www variant of your homepage. Or click the example link to prefill http://github.com and watch a real-world HTTP-to-HTTPS chain resolve.

  2. 2

    Read the summary strip first

    Three numbers up top: how many redirects fired, the final HTTP status, and the final content type. Zero redirects with a 200 is the ideal for a canonical page. One hop is normal for legacy URLs. Two or more is a chain worth collapsing — and anything ending in a 4xx or 5xx means the redirect is pointing at a dead page.

  3. 3

    Walk the chain hop by hop

    Each hop is a card: the status code badge (amber for 3xx redirects, green for 200, red for errors), the exact URL, and a lock indicator showing whether that hop was served over HTTPS. Between hops you see the raw Location header from the response — the same http header a crawler reads to decide where to go next.

  4. 4

    Act on the warnings

    Amber callouts flag the problems that matter: long chains, temporary redirects (302/307) sitting on what look like permanent moves, hops that fall back to insecure http://, and chains that end somewhere other than a healthy 200. A red callout means a loop — fix that immediately, because the URL is effectively down.

  5. 5

    Collapse chains at the source

    The fix is almost never 'add another redirect' — it's editing the original rule so every variant points directly at the final URL in exactly one hop. Update your server config (or CDN rules) so http://, www, and old paths each 301 straight to the canonical destination, then re-run the check to confirm a single hop. Also update internal links so they skip the redirect entirely.

The thresholds that matter in 2026: Google follows up to 10 hops in a redirect chain before it gives up and reports a redirect error in Search Console, and browsers bail at around 20 — but performance falls apart long before that. Every hop is a full network round trip, commonly 100–300ms on mobile, paid before a single byte of your page renders. The practical rule is one hop maximum from any URL that earns traffic or links. The classic offender is the stacked migration: http://example.com → https://example.com → https://www.example.com → https://www.example.com/ is three hops that should be one rule sending every variant directly to the canonical form.

On the 301 vs 302 question: since 2016 Google has said no PageRank is lost through any 3xx redirect, so the old '301s leak 15%' folklore is dead. What still differs is canonicalization. A 301 or 308 is an unambiguous instruction — index the destination, drop the source. A 302 or 307 says the move is temporary, so Google may keep the old URL indexed and delay consolidating signals onto the new one, sometimes for months. If a move is permanent, use a permanent code. One more gotcha: if you check a URL in Chrome DevTools and see a 307 you never configured, that's usually the browser's internal HSTS upgrade, not a real server response — which is exactly why a server-side redirect checker like this one shows you the truth a crawler sees instead.

Two failure modes deserve special paranoia. First, redirecting retired pages en masse to your homepage: Google treats irrelevant redirects as soft 404s, so the link equity you were trying to save evaporates anyway — redirect each old URL to its closest living equivalent instead. Second, redirect targets that rot: a chain that ended in a 200 last year can end in a 404 today because someone deleted the destination. Your most-linked legacy URLs should be re-checked after every restructure, because they're the pipes your backlink authority flows through. A redirect checker run takes seconds; a quarter of lost equity from a silent 404 chain does not come back quickly.

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Questions

Frequently asked

What is a redirect checker and is it free?

A redirect checker is a tool that follows a URL through every redirect it triggers and shows you each hop's HTTP status code, URL and headers until it reaches the final destination. This one is completely free with no signup — paste a URL, and it traces the chain from our servers and renders every hop, the final status, the content type and any SEO warnings in seconds.

What's the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect?

A 301 says the move is permanent: search engines transfer indexing signals to the new URL and drop the old one. A 302 says the move is temporary, so Google keeps the old URL indexed and may wait months before consolidating signals onto the target. Use 301 (or 308) for migrations and permanent URL changes; reserve 302 (or 307) for genuinely short-lived situations like A/B tests or maintenance pages.

How many redirects are too many for SEO?

Aim for one hop maximum from any URL that matters. Googlebot follows up to 10 hops before reporting a redirect error, but every hop adds a full network round trip — often 100–300ms on mobile — before your page even starts loading. If this redirect chain checker shows two or more hops, collapse the rules so every variant points directly at the final URL.

Do redirects lose PageRank or link equity?

Not by the code alone — since 2016 Google has confirmed that no PageRank is lost through 3xx redirects, whether 301, 302, 307 or 308. Equity is lost in other ways: chains that end in a 404 or 410, redirect loops, and mass redirects to an irrelevant page like the homepage, which Google treats as soft 404s. The redirect passing signals only helps if the destination is a live, relevant 200 page.

Why do I see a 307 redirect I never set up?

If you saw it in your browser's DevTools, it's almost certainly an internal HSTS upgrade: once a site sends a Strict-Transport-Security header, Chrome rewrites http:// to https:// itself and labels it '307 Internal Redirect' without any network request. A server-side URL redirect checker like this one shows what actually happens on the wire — if the 307 appears here too, your server or CDN is genuinely sending it, and you should switch it to a 301/308 if the move is permanent.

Can this tool detect redirect loops?

Yes. If the chain revisits a URL it already passed through, the tool stops and flags a redirect loop explicitly. Loops are the most urgent redirect problem you can have: visitors get an ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error page, crawlers abandon the URL, and the page effectively disappears from the web until the conflicting rules — often one rule adding a trailing slash while another removes it — are fixed.

Check redirects one URL at a time here. Audit every URL automatically.

This tool is perfect for spot-checking a URL — but chains, loops and misused 302s creep in across hundreds of URLs every time a rule changes, and nobody re-checks them by hand. Black & Gold SEO crawls your whole site, flags every redirect chain, loop, insecure hop and dead-end target alongside 19 other automated processes, and ships the approved fixes to your site instead of handing you another spreadsheet. Plans start at $49.99/mo for one site.

Start with Black & Gold SEOSee all 20 processes