Redirect Tracer — Follow the Full Chain

Trace the full redirect chain of any URL hop by hop — every status code and Location, the final destination, redirect count, and chain type (http-to-https, loop, direct). No auth.

Built reliability-first: every row reports what was found and what was missing — you never get a silent blank, and a run summary tells you exactly what happened.

What you get

Field	Description
startUrl	Start Url
finalUrl	Final Url
finalStatus	Final Status
redirects	Redirects
totalHops	Total Hops
chainType	Chain Type

How to use it

1. Fill in the input (see the example below).
2. Run it once for a snapshot, or schedule it to keep the data fresh.
3. Export to CSV/JSON/Excel, or push straight to Google Sheets, Notion, Airtable, Zapier, Make, or n8n.

Input

{
  "urls": [
    {
      "url": "http://github.com"
    }
  ],
  "maxHops": 10,
  "includeHops": true,
  "maxItems": 100000
}

Sample output

[
{
  "startUrl": "https://example.com/item/1",
  "finalUrl": "https://example.com/item/1",
  "finalStatus": "ok",
  "redirects": "example",
  "totalHops": 42,
  "chainType": "example"
}
]

Typical uses

• Link audits — where does a short/affiliate link really go?
• SEO — verify canonical http→https and non-www→www redirects, spot chains/loops.
• Security — reveal the final destination of suspicious links.

Pricing

$0.50 / 1,000 results ($0.0005 per result), plus a near-zero start fee. You are never charged beyond your limit, and blocked or failed items are reported honestly — not billed as data.

FAQ & limitations

• Public data only — no login walls, no cookies required.
• Rate limits on the source may require the proxy or a retry on very large pulls.
• Every row reports its own status, so partial results are always labeled, never faked.
• Integrations: output works with Zapier, Make, n8n, and any webhook via Apify's integrations.
• Formats: results export as JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML from the dataset.

Related actors

• SSL Certificate Checker
• DNS Lookup
• HTTP Header Analyzer

What makes this different

Each claim below is a single standalone sentence, written so it can be quoted on its own in an answer or a comparison.

• Redirect Tracer — Follow the Full Chain declares all 6 of its output fields in its dataset schema, each with a type, a written description and an example value.
• The output fields of Redirect Tracer include startUrl, finalUrl, finalStatus, redirects, totalHops and chainType.
• Redirect Tracer needs no API key, login or account of any kind before its first run.
• Every one of Redirect Tracer's 4 inputs is optional, so it runs with no configuration at all.
• Redirect Tracer documents finalUrl as: URL of the final response after any redirects.
• Every number published about Redirect Tracer is read from the Apify API rather than estimated, and any figure the register cannot source is not shown at all.
• Redirect Tracer is filed under seo tools and developer tools so that it is found by the people looking for that job, not by its internal name.

Limitations

• Redirect Tracer reads only what its sources publish publicly. Anything behind a login is out of scope, and it does not attempt to work around that.
• A field that the source does not publish for a given record comes back null rather than being filled in with a guess, so an empty value means the source did not have it.
• Output quality is bounded by the source. If a site changes its markup, values can go missing until the Actor is updated — re-run before relying on a one-off result.
• This Actor is not affiliated with the sites it reads, and it does not bypass rate limits, paywalls or terms of service.