Redirect Chain Analyzer

Analyze HTTP redirect behavior (301/302/303/307/308) for one or more URLs and produce an SEO-friendly report:

• Detect long redirect chains (more than 1 hop)
• Detect redirect loops
• Detect missing Location headers on 3xx responses
• Optionally flag cross-domain redirects
• Report final status code (e.g., 200 OK vs 404)

Useful for:

• SEO audits (chains waste crawl budget and slow down users)
• Site migrations (HTTP→HTTPS, www→non-www, URL rewrites)
• Canonicalization checks and redirect rule debugging

Input

• Start URLs (startUrls) — required
• Max redirects per URL (maxRedirects) — default 10
• Use HEAD first (useHeadRequest) — default true (falls back to lightweight GET)
• Allow cross-domain redirects (allowCrossDomain) — default true
• Request timeout (timeoutSecs) — default 20
• Max concurrency (maxConcurrency) — default 5
• Proxy configuration (proxyConfiguration) — optional

Output

Dataset (one item per input URL)

Each dataset item contains:

• startUrl, finalUrl, finalStatusCode
• redirectCount, hopCount
• hasLoop, tooManyHops, totalTimeMs, ok
• warnings, errors
• chain (array of hop objects)

Key-value store

• SUMMARY — totals + timing
• REPORT — top issues (up to 200 URLs)

Notes

• Some sites block HEAD. If you see many failures, set Use HEAD first to false.
• The actor uses lightweight GET with Range: bytes=0-0 to avoid downloading full pages.

Quick start

Store page: https://apify.com/scrappy_garden/redirect-chain-analyzer

Paste this into Input and click Run:

{
  "startUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://example.com/"
    }
  ],
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

Outputs (what you get)

• Dataset: Dataset items typically include fields like: startUrl, finalUrl, finalStatusCode, redirectCount, hopCount, hasLoop, tooManyHops, ok, warningCount, errorCount.
• Key-value store: REPORT, SUMMARY

Tips (trust + predictable results)

• Start with 1–3 URLs to validate behavior, then scale up.
• If a target blocks requests, enable Proxy and/or slow down concurrency in Input.
• Use the SUMMARY / REPORT keys (when present) for automation pipelines and monitoring.

Related actors

• broken-link-checker (https://apify.com/scrappy_garden/broken-link-checker)
• canonical-url-checker (https://apify.com/scrappy_garden/canonical-url-checker)
• meta-tag-analyzer (https://apify.com/scrappy_garden/meta-tag-analyzer)
• security-headers-checker (https://apify.com/scrappy_garden/security-headers-checker)

Search keywords

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