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Redirect Chain & Loop Checker
A redirect chain and loop checker reads a redirect map and tells you which sources pass through more than one hop before they land, and which ones cycle back on themselves and never resolve. Every extra hop in a chain leaks a little link equity, slows the page for users and crawlers, and wastes crawl budget, while a redirect loop returns an error and removes the page from the index entirely. Both problems are invisible until something maps the rules end to end.
This free, browser-based tool builds a directed graph from the pairs you paste, follows each chain to its final destination, and flags the hop count, status, and the single-hop target you should redirect to instead. It analyses the map only, never visits a URL, and runs entirely on your machine.
, · tab · -> as the separator.
This tool analyses the redirect map you paste. It never fetches or visits any URL — no network requests are made.
🔒 Private: everything runs in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded.
How to use the redirect chain and loop checker
Paste your redirect rules as one source-and-destination pair per line. The tool accepts a comma, a tab, or an arrow as the separator, rebuilds the graph on every keystroke, and groups each source by status so chains and loops surface immediately.
Read the hop path and collapse every chain to one redirect
For each source the tool prints the full hop path, such as A to B to C, with the final destination highlighted and the hop count beside it. Any source with two or more hops is a chain, and the recommended fix is to point the original source straight at the final target so the redirect resolves in a single step. Search engines follow chains, but each hop dilutes the signal a 301 is meant to pass, and browsers add a round trip per hop. Collapsing chains is the single highest-value redirect cleanup on most migrated sites.
Catch loops before they pull pages out of the index
A redirect loop happens when a source eventually points back to a node already visited, so the request bounces between URLs and the browser returns a too-many-redirects error. The checker tracks every node it has seen while following a chain, so it stops the moment a cycle closes rather than running forever, then marks the source as a loop and underlines the URL where the cycle returns. A looping page is unreachable, drops out of the index, and breaks any link pointing to it, so loops are the first thing to fix in any redirect audit.
Export a clean single-hop map you can paste back
Once the chains and loops are visible, the Copy fix map button emits a corrected source-to-final-target pair for every chain and direct redirect, ready to drop into your server config, while loops are written as comments because they need a human decision before a safe target exists. The CSV export adds the status, hop count, and full path for every source so the report can be shared or tracked. Because the whole analysis is a static graph of the map you pasted, nothing leaves the browser and the same input always produces the same result.
Redirect chain and loop checker frequently asked questions
Q1What is a redirect chain and why is it a problem?
A redirect chain is when one URL redirects to a second, which redirects to a third, before reaching the final page. Each hop adds a round trip that slows the page, and search engines pass slightly less ranking signal through every additional redirect. Chains also burn crawl budget. The fix is to point the original source directly at the final destination so the redirect resolves in a single hop.
Q2What causes a redirect loop?
A redirect loop happens when the chain of redirects eventually points back to a URL it already visited, so the request bounces in a circle and never reaches a real page. Common causes are conflicting rules, a forced trailing slash fighting a rule that removes it, or HTTP and HTTPS rules that send each other back and forth. The browser stops with a too-many-redirects error and the page becomes unreachable.
Q3Does this tool fetch or visit my URLs?
No. The tool analyses only the redirect map you paste into the box. It builds a graph from those pairs and follows the chains mathematically, without making any network request, so it never visits, fetches, or pings a single URL. That means it works on staging maps and unpublished rules, runs offline once loaded, and keeps everything you paste on your own machine.
Q4How many redirect hops are acceptable?
The ideal is a single hop: one redirect straight from the old URL to the final destination. Search engines will follow several hops, but each one wastes time and dilutes the passed signal, so two or more hops should be collapsed during any cleanup. There is no need to redirect a page that is already the final destination, so the goal is one clean redirect per source and zero loops.
Q5What separators can I use in the redirect map?
Paste one source-and-destination pair per line using a comma, a tab, or an arrow written as a hyphen and a greater-than sign between the two values. The arrow and tab are matched before any comma, so URLs that contain a comma in a query string still parse correctly when you use one of those separators. Blank lines and lines starting with a hash are ignored as comments.
