For SEO audits
Find redirect chains, loops, and chains that hurt rankings.
Each redirect hop costs latency and (historically) a small amount of PageRank. Long chains and loops can deindex pages or break canonicalization.
301s pass equity; 302s technically don't (though Google has softened this). Avoid mixing them in the same chain.
Google has publicly stated that Googlebot follows up to 10 redirect hops before giving up (as of recent documentation — verify current guidance), but 'followed' and 'healthy' are different things. Long chains slow crawling, dilute the clarity of your canonical signals, and multiply the chances that one hop in the chain is misconfigured. The professional standard is one hop: old URL, single 301, final destination.
Chains accumulate through ordinary site history rather than anyone's bad decision: the http-to-https migration adds a hop, the www consolidation adds another, the 2023 URL restructure adds a third, and suddenly /old-page bounces through four addresses to reach its content. Each individually reasonable redirect compounds into a chain nobody designed. Migration QA should always include collapsing inherited chains so every legacy URL points directly at its final home.
Status code semantics still matter for how search engines consolidate signals: 301 and 308 signal permanence (index the destination), 302 and 307 signal temporariness (keep the original indexed). A 302 left in place for years sends a mixed message — Google usually figures it out and treats it as permanent, but 'usually figures it out' is not a strategy. Say what you mean with the right code.
The subtle killers this audit surfaces: redirects that land on a page whose canonical tag points somewhere else again (a canonical-redirect disagreement Google resolves unpredictably), chains that mix 301s and 302s so the permanence signal is ambiguous, redirects to soft-404 pages, and loops — which return errors to crawlers and can drop pages from the index entirely.
Redirects are also part of Core Web Vitals math: every hop happens before the first byte of real content, inflating Time to First Byte on the user's very first impression. A three-hop chain on a landing page can add hundreds of milliseconds on mobile networks before your page even starts loading — an entirely self-inflicted performance cost.
Verify post-migration redirects resolve in one hop with the right status code — before Googlebot spends weeks discovering the ones that don't.
Eliminate chains that waste Googlebot's crawl budget on the same destination — on large sites, chained URLs measurably slow re-crawling of the content that matters.
Catch chains that resolve to a different canonical than intended, and redirect-canonical disagreements that leave Google guessing which URL is real.
Find URLs that traverse http→https→www→current-structure hops and collapse them to a single 301 each — years of accumulated migrations, undone in an afternoon.
Audit paid and campaign landing URLs for redirect hops that inflate TTFB — pre-content latency you're paying for with both speed and ad-platform quality metrics.
Pre-configured variants tuned to specific platforms and use cases.