What Is a Redirect Chain?
A redirect chain is the sequence of HTTP redirects a browser (or this checker) follows before landing on a URL's real final destination. Each hop costs a full round-trip: extra latency for a visitor, and extra crawl budget for a search engine. This tool opens a real connection to the URL you enter and manually follows each redirect itself (rather than letting the request silently auto-follow them), timing every hop along the way, so what you see here is exactly what a real client would experience, not an estimate.
301 vs 302 vs 307 vs 308, Explained
301 (Moved Permanently) and 308 (Permanent Redirect) tell search engines and browsers to remember the new location for good; 308 additionally guarantees the request method (POST stays POST) where 301 technically allows a browser to switch it to GET. 302 (Found) and 307 (Temporary Redirect) signal a temporary move that shouldn't be cached long-term; again, 307 preserves the method where 302 doesn't strictly guarantee it. 303 (See Other) explicitly tells the client to re-fetch the result with GET, common after a form POST. Using a temporary code for what's actually a permanent move is a common, easy-to-miss mistake this checker surfaces directly.
Why Redirect Chain Length Matters for SEO and Performance
Every hop in a chain adds a full DNS lookup and HTTP round-trip before the actual page can start loading; on a slow connection, a 3-hop chain can add a full second or more before anything renders. Search engines also allocate a limited crawl budget per site and per chain; a long enough chain can cause a crawler to give up before reaching the real destination. The fix is almost always the same: point the link or DNS record directly at the final URL instead of the first redirect in the chain.
What This Tool Doesn't Check
This checker traces real HTTP-level redirects (a 3xx status with a Location header); it deliberately does not detect HTML `<meta http-equiv="refresh">` redirects or JavaScript-based redirects, since catching those would require fetching and executing page content this tool has no other reason to load, for a URL that might not even be an HTML page (this tool works on images and API endpoints too, unlike most SEO tools that require HTML). If a chain seems to stop somewhere unexpected and the destination page itself immediately navigates elsewhere, check its source for a meta-refresh tag or client-side redirect script.
Common Ways to Use a Redirect Checker
Beyond spot-checking a single link, this covers most of the real reasons people trace a redirect: confirming a domain migration actually lands on the canonical www or non-www version instead of bouncing between both, verifying a new .htaccess or server rewrite rule resolves the way you intended before it ships everywhere, checking that an affiliate link or shortened URL still points to the real destination and hasn't quietly broken or been hijacked, and auditing outbound links on a site for dead-end or needlessly long redirect chains.