How to check redirects and HTTP headers
Paste a landing-page or canonical URL to see the live redirect chain, response headers, and plain-English findings for SEO and PPC. Checks run from our server (curl-style), so hop-by-hop behaviour matches what ad platforms and crawlers see — not what a browser silently repairs.
- Enter a full URL or bare domain (we add
https://when needed). - Optionally open Advanced options to change method, User-Agent, cloaking diff, or tracking probes.
- Click Check.
- Read Findings first, then the Redirect chain and Final response headers.
Tracking probes
If your URL has no click IDs or UTMs, we can append safe test values (gclid, UTMs, _gl, and related) so you can see whether redirects preserve them. Real parameters on the URL are never overwritten.
Cloaking diff
With cloaking diff on (default), we fetch once as Chrome and once as Googlebot Smartphone. Status, final URL, or canonical differences surface as findings. Some hosts verify Googlebot by reverse-DNS and may block datacentre checks — treat that as a tool limitation, not an automatic SEO failure.
Reading severity
- Pass — observation only, or a healthy short chain.
- Attention — worth reviewing (long chains, missing security headers, temporary same-host redirects, cache-forever 301s).
- Fail — tracking dropped, https downgrade, restrictive robots, or clear cloaking signals.
Why check redirects for SEO and PPC?
Google Ads can lose click data when redirects strip gclid / gbraid / wbraid. SEO equity consolidates poorly across long or temporary chains. Server-side header checks also surface HSTS, CSP, X-Robots-Tag, and canonical mismatches that a browser DevTools view can hide behind JS.
FAQ
- Does this execute JavaScript redirects? No. We only see HTTP responses. Meta refresh in the HTML head is detected separately.
- Will Cloudflare block the check? Sometimes. We flag bot-management style 403s and ask you to compare in a browser.
- Are share links safe to send? Yes — share restores inputs only (
u, options). Findings are never embedded in the URL. - What are the limits? Up to 10 redirects, about 8 seconds per hop and 20 seconds per User-Agent side, and a 256KB HTML head peek for canonical / meta refresh parsing.
Related tools
Use the sitemap URL extractor when you need every loc from a sitemap index. Link the published Tools URLs in CMS once both pages are live.
