Redirect Checker: Trace Every Hop, Status & Loop

Four status codes cover almost every redirect, and they split into two pairs. Google treats 301 and 308 as permanent — show the new URL in search — and 302 and 307 as temporary, keep the old one.

Meta refresh redirects work, but Google says server-side redirects are the most reliable signal. This checker flags them.

Check the first hop. If a page moved for good and the chain starts with a 302, Google may keep showing the old URL for a while. Switching a permanent move to 301 or 308 is usually a one-line server change.

When we traced http:// homepages of 379 well-known sites in October 2026 (dataset), the first redirect was a 301 85.8% of the time and a 308 12.9% of the time. Only 1.3% started with a 302 — but 8.1% of chains had a temporary redirect somewhere along the way.

One is ideal; three is a problem. Google's crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops, but every hop adds a round trip for users and crawl time for bots.

Long chains are more common than you'd think. In our sample, 44.3% of sites needed two or more hops to get from http://domain to the final homepage — typically http → https → www. Only 53.6% did it in one.

Read the table top to bottom. Each row is one request: the URL, its status, where it pointed and the time it took. Then check the verdicts underneath:

• Redirect loop — the chain returns to a URL it already visited. Browsers and crawlers give up.
• 2+ hops — point the first URL straight at the final destination.
• Temporary redirect on a permanent move — switch to 301 or 308.
• Ends on 4xx or 5xx — the chain leads nowhere, and visitors and link signals are lost.

Update the first rule so it targets the final URL directly, then update internal links to point at the final URL so most visitors never hit a redirect at all. For http, https and www variants, one combined rule can do both changes in a single hop.

Checking many URLs at once? Use the HTTP status checker. For the decision between temporary and permanent, see 301 vs 302.