Comparison

Bulk redirect checkers, compared

Three tools that overlap without being interchangeable. Which one you want depends on whether you are asking where a URL goes, or whether the page at the end will be indexed.

Last reviewed 2026-08-21. We build one of the tools compared here; where another does the job better, this page says so.

Short answer

If you want to check a lot of URLs with control over how the request is made, use httpstatus.io. It takes 100 URLs per batch to our 25, offers a long list of user agents, supports custom headers and basic auth, and exports to Google Sheets. On raw redirect-checking capability it does more than we do, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

If you are auditing a whole site rather than a list you already have, use Screaming Frog. A crawler is the right shape of tool for that, and a batch checker is not.

Ours is worth using when the redirect is not really the question: when what you want to know is whether the destination will be indexed, which means robots.txt, noindex, canonical and headers alongside the chain.

Side by side

	httpstatus.io	Screaming Frog	InstantIndexNow
URLs per batch	100	Crawls a site; free tier caps at 500 URLs	25
Redirect hops shown	Up to 10	Full chain	Up to 15
Choose a user agent	Yes, long list	Yes	No
Custom headers / basic auth	Yes	Yes	No
Export	CSV, XLS, Google Sheets	CSV, XLS	CSV
API and integrations	Yes, plus Make, n8n, Airtable, Retool	Via CLI	Yes, plus an MCP server
Runs in a browser	Yes	No: desktop app	Yes
Indexability verdict alongside the chain	No	Yes, as part of a crawl	Yes
IndexNow submission	No	No	Yes

Capabilities above were read from each product's own documentation on 2026-08-21. Pricing is deliberately not compared here: it changes faster than this page can be maintained, and a stale price is worse than no price.

The failure these tools exist to catch

A redirect that lands on a dead page is invisible to a plain status check. Ask for the status of /old-product and you get 301: entirely healthy, exactly what you configured. The 404 is at the other end of the hop, and unless the tool follows the chain and reports the final status as a separate value, nothing about that result looks wrong.

This is the single most common way a migration quietly loses pages. The redirect map was written, the redirects work, and a percentage of them point at URLs that were renamed again afterwards. All three tools above will find it; a status checker that reports one number per URL will not.

Where we are genuinely different

Redirect checking is a means to an end for us rather than the product. The chain is reported alongside the other signals that decide whether the destination gets indexed, and the same checks are available as an MCP server, so Claude or ChatGPT can run them directly instead of describing what they would check.

If your question is "where does this URL end up", the tools above answer it and answer it well. If your question is "why is this page not in the index", a redirect chain is one of five or six things you need at once, and that is the report we built.

Questions

What is the best bulk redirect checker?

For volume and control, httpstatus.io: it handles 100 URLs per batch, lets you pick from a long list of user agents, supports custom request headers and basic auth, and exports to CSV or Google Sheets. For auditing an entire site rather than a list, Screaming Frog. Our checker is smaller in batch size and better when the question behind the redirect is whether the destination will actually get indexed.

Why does a redirect checker show a healthy 301 when the page is broken?

Because the URL you tested really does return a healthy 301. The problem is at the other end. A checker that reports only the status of the URL you supplied will call that a pass. You need one that follows the chain and reports the final status separately, which is the only way a 301 pointing at a 404 becomes visible.

How many redirect hops are too many?

More than one is worth fixing, and more than three is a real problem. Every hop adds a round trip for the visitor, and search engines apply their own limits before giving up: chains that long usually mean successive migrations were layered on top of each other rather than collapsed.

Do I need to pay for a redirect checker?

Usually not. Free tiers cover the ordinary case comfortably. Paying makes sense when you are auditing tens of thousands of URLs, need scheduled monitoring rather than a one-off check, or want the results in a pipeline via an API.