How it works

What each redirect code is telling the client

A redirect is just a status code and a Location header, but the code carries a promise about the future, and browsers and search engines hold you to it.

Why this matters more for cold email than for a normal website

Every link in a campaign is rewritten to pass through a tracking domain, which records the click and then redirects to the real destination. That means each click is a redirect chain by design, and the destination is usually somewhere the sender has no direct control over — a calendar page, a case study, a landing page on the main site with its own HTTP → HTTPS → www rules.

Gmail, Outlook and the enterprise link scanners in front of them follow those chains before the human does. A hop that downgrades to HTTP, lands on a 404, or bounces through four temporary redirects reads as sloppy at best and phishing-adjacent at worst. On a fleet of thirty domains it is very easy for one destination to quietly break and stay broken, because you rarely click your own links. Run the tracking URL from a real sent message through this checker and you see exactly what the recipient and their filter see.

Chains and loops

Two hops is common and usually accidental: http://example.com becomes https://example.com, which then becomes https://www.example.com. Each hop is another round trip on the visitor's connection and another place for ranking signals to leak. Google says it follows up to ten hops, but treats anything past two or three as a quality signal, and older tools and some mail clients stop earlier.

The fix is always the same: make the first rule point straight at the final URL rather than at the next rule. A loop — where the chain comes back to a URL it already visited — is nearly always two rules disagreeing about the canonical host, and it shows up to visitors as the browser's “too many redirects” error.

Permanent when you mean it, temporary when you don't

The most common mistake this tool surfaces is a 302 doing a 301's job. The HTTP → HTTPS hop, a domain migration and a retired page are all permanent, and a 302 on any of them tells search engines to keep indexing the old address. Cloudflare's Redirect Rules, Nginx and Apache all default to a temporary redirect unless you say otherwise, so it is worth checking rather than assuming.

The reverse mistake is subtler. Browsers cache a 301 aggressively, so a permanent redirect put in place during a migration and later changed will keep sending returning visitors to the old destination for a long time. If a redirect is still being adjusted, leave it as a 302 until it settles.

Checking a list

Paste up to a hundred URLs and the checker works through them ten at a time, one batch a minute, with the results filling in as they arrive. Each row shows the verdict, the chain of status codes and the final URL; the Details button opens the full hop-by-hop view for that row without spending another check, and Copy CSV gives you the table for a spreadsheet.

The limits are deliberate. Every check is a real request from a Cloudflare address to someone else's server, and a tool that let anyone fire thousands of them would get that address blocked — and would be a nuisance to the sites on the receiving end. Ten a minute and a hundred a day per person is enough to audit a migration or a campaign's links without either of those things happening.

What a server sees is not always what you see

This checker follows the chain from a Cloudflare edge server, which is the honest view: it is what every crawler and link scanner gets. But sites that route by country, by device, by cookie or by login state, and sites that challenge datacenter IP addresses, can send a real visitor somewhere different. That is why each result includes buttons to open the final URL and to follow the chain from the start in your own browser. If the two disagree, the difference is itself the finding.

Frequently asked questions

Last reviewed September 8, 2026