Redirect Checker

Follow any URL hop by hop and see the status code, timing and mechanism behind every redirect — then find out which URL you should actually be submitting to search engines. Free, no account.

Why redirects matter for indexing

A redirect is not a bug. It is how a site survives a migration, a rename or a merge without losing the links pointing at the old address. What costs you is the redirect you did not know about: the 302 that should have been a 301, the chain that grew a hop every time someone "fixed" the URL structure, the destination that quietly went 404 two deploys ago.

This matters doubly when you are submitting URLs. An IndexNow submission is an instruction to crawl a specific URL. Point it at a redirect and the engine spends a request learning what you already knew. Point it at a chain ending in a 404 and you have asked several search engines to go and look at a broken page, which is worse than saying nothing at all.

So every result here ends with a plain statement of what to submit — the destination, the canonical, or nothing at all if the page is broken or set to noindex.

Frequently asked questions

Should I submit the original URL or the redirect destination to IndexNow?
The destination. An IndexNow submission names a URL for the engine to crawl; if that URL 301s, the engine spends a request discovering what you already knew and indexes the destination anyway. Submit the URL you actually want in the index. If the destination declares a different canonical, submit the canonical instead — that is the URL the engine will ultimately keep.

What is the difference between a 301 and a 302?
A 301 is permanent: search engines transfer ranking signals to the destination and eventually replace the old URL in their index. A 302 is temporary: engines keep the original URL indexed and pass little or no link equity. Using a 302 for a move that is actually permanent is one of the most common and most costly redirect mistakes, because the new URL never accumulates the authority of the old one.

How many redirects is too many?
One is normal. Two is tolerable. Three or more is worth fixing: every hop adds a full round trip before anything renders, mobile users feel it most, and each hop is another chance for something to break. Google follows a limited number of hops and gives up beyond that — a chain long enough to be truncated means the destination is never reached at all.

Do meta refresh and JavaScript redirects count?
They redirect users, but they are weaker signals than a server-side 301 and they are slower, because the browser must download and parse the page before it learns it is going somewhere else. This checker labels each hop with the mechanism that produced it, so you can see which hops are server-side and which are not.

Why does my URL redirect to itself?
That is a redirect loop, and it makes the page unreachable for everyone including search engines. It usually comes from two rules disagreeing — an HTTP-to-HTTPS rule and a www rule that each undo the other, or a trailing-slash rule fighting a CMS. This checker detects loops and stops rather than following them forever.

Does this tool visit the link in my browser?
No. The chain is followed server-side, so no cookies are set in your browser, no JavaScript from the destination runs on your machine, and the destination sees our server rather than your IP. That is what makes it safe to inspect a link you do not trust.