Free Redirect Checker and HTTP Status Code Checker

Follow any URL hop by hop and see every status code, Location header and timing, in bulk if you have a redirect map to verify. Then see what each host's robots.txt actually lets GPTBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot reach along the way.

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Every redirect checker shows you the hops. This one also shows you which of them an AI crawler is allowed to reach.

Key takeaways

  • A redirect chain is invisible in a browser. You see the final page, not the three hops and the 302 that got you there.
  • The status code decides whether clients keep asking the old URL. A 301 and a 308 are heuristically cacheable under RFC 9110; a 302, 303 and 307 are not.
  • robots.txt is scoped to one host, so a chain that crosses hosts is governed by the destination’s file, not the one you checked.
  • That is the failure this tool was built for: a page that moved to a host where an AI crawler is disallowed goes quiet in AI answers with nothing on the origin server to show for it.
  • Free, no signup, no email box, and embeddable on your own site.

Why the chain matters for AI search

What a Redirect Chain Costs You in AI Search

A page that moves keeps its traffic if the redirect is clean. What it does not automatically keep is its place in the sources an AI assistant draws on, because the systems behind ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude reach your content through named crawlers that read robots.txt before they read anything else.

The mechanism worth knowing is narrow and specific. RFC 9309 scopes a robots.txt file to a single authority, meaning one scheme, host and port. So the moment a redirect crosses hosts, the file that governs the destination is the destination host's file. Move a documentation section from your main domain to a subdomain, or hand a marketing path to a hosted platform, and the permissions that apply are the ones on the new host, which is frequently a file you did not write and have never read.

This is a quiet failure rather than a loud one. Nothing 404s. Analytics look normal, because human traffic follows the chain and lands fine. What changes is that a crawler which was permitted on the old host is disallowed on the new one, the content stops being re-read, and the citations that used to come back thin out over the following weeks with no error anywhere to point at.

The checker reads robots.txt for every host in the chain, not just the one you typed, and tells you per crawler whether every hop is permitted. If you want the same read across a whole site rather than one URL, the free AI SEO audit covers crawler permissions alongside the rest of the citation-readiness checks.

The honest version

What This Tool Verifies About AI Crawlers, and What It Will Not Claim

We sell AI SEO, which is the worst possible place to be vague about what is measured and what is guessed. So here is the split, in full.

Checked, and sourced

  • Every hop's status code, Location header and elapsed time, fetched with redirects followed manually so nothing is collapsed.
  • Whether each host's robots.txt permits GPTBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot to fetch that hop, matched per RFC 9309: most specific rule wins, an equivalent allow beats a disallow, and a missing file means permitted.
  • That all three vendors document robots.txt as the control for these crawlers. Anthropic states it outright ("Anthropic's Bots respect 'do not crawl' signals by honoring industry standard directives in robots.txt"); OpenAI and Perplexity document how to disallow theirs rather than using that exact sentence. Read them yourself: OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic.
  • What each status code means for a client that caches, taken from RFC 9110 section 15.4 rather than from folk knowledge.

Not claimed, because nobody publishes it

  • How many hops GPTBot, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot will follow before giving up. None of the three document a limit for ordinary page fetches.
  • Whether any of them caches a 301 target the way a browser does, or for how long. Not documented by any vendor.
  • Whether a crawler treats a 302 differently from a 307 in practice. RFC 9110 defines the difference; no vendor states how their crawler acts on it.
  • Anything about the crawlers a vendor runs on a user's behalf rather than for indexing. Perplexity documents that Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt, and OpenAI says the same may apply to ChatGPT-User, so the robots.txt read above does not describe those.

Every other redirect checker on this search result says nothing at all about AI crawlers. We would rather say the checkable half loudly than the whole thing vaguely.

Status code reference

What Each Redirect Status Code Means

The checker labels every hop with the code the server returned. The codes are not interchangeable, and the difference between them is mostly about what a client is entitled to remember.

  • 301

    Moved Permanently

    The right code for a page that has moved for good. Heuristically cacheable under RFC 9110, so clients may remember it and stop requesting the old URL.

  • 302

    Found

    Temporary, and not heuristically cacheable. The most common wrong answer: used for permanent moves, it keeps every client asking the old address forever.

  • 303

    See Other

    Points at a different resource, fetched with GET. Normal after a form post, out of place in a page-to-page chain.

  • 307

    Temporary Redirect

    Temporary like a 302, but the request method is never rewritten. Not heuristically cacheable.

  • 308

    Permanent Redirect

    Permanent like a 301, and the method is never rewritten. The strictest way to say a URL moved.

  • 404 / 410

    The chain ends nowhere

    A redirect landing on a 404 is worse than no redirect: it spends a hop and a link to arrive at nothing. This is the single most common finding in a bulk run after a migration.

Bulk mode

How to Check Redirects in Bulk

One URL at a time is the wrong unit of work after a migration. Switch the tool to bulk paste, drop in one URL per line, and it resolves up to 20 chains in a single run and lists each one with its own hops and crawler verdicts.

The three things a bulk run surfaces that a redirect map never does: rows that were supposed to be one hop and are now three, rows that land on a 404 because the destination moved again after the map was written, and rows whose destination sits on a host with different crawler permissions. The first costs speed, the second costs the link, and the third is the one nothing else on your stack will tell you about.

A practical order: export the source URLs from your redirect rules, paste them in batches, and work the failures before the slow ones. A chain that ends in a 200 is a performance problem. A chain that ends in a 404 is a lost page.

From check to fix

How to Fix a Redirect Chain

  1. 1

    Collapse the chain to one hop

    Point the first URL straight at the final destination. If A goes to B goes to C, rewrite the rule so A goes to C and leave B alone for anything still linking to it.

  2. 2

    Make permanent moves permanent

    A page that has moved for good gets a 301 or a 308. A 302 on a permanent move tells every client to keep requesting the address you abandoned, indefinitely.

  3. 3

    Fix the chains that end in a 404 first

    A redirect to a missing page is worse than no redirect. It consumes the hop, the link and the crawl, and returns nothing.

  4. 4

    Check robots.txt on the destination host

    If the chain crosses hosts, the destination host’s robots.txt is what governs. Confirm GPTBot, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot are permitted there, not only on the host you started from.

  5. 5

    Re-run the check and keep the output

    Re-run after the rules ship and confirm the hop count actually dropped. A rule that was written is not a rule that is live: the served response is the only evidence.

Put it on your own site

Embed the Redirect Checker

The checker runs in an iframe on any site, free, with no account on either side. Paste this wherever you want it.

<iframe
  src="https://www.rankzero.io/embed/redirect-checker"
  width="100%"
  height="720"
  frameborder="0"
  style="border: 1px solid #e5e7eb; border-radius: 8px;"
  title="Redirect Checker by RankZero"
></iframe>

Redirect checker questions

What the tool checks, and what it deliberately does not claim.

A redirect checker follows a URL the way a client does, one hop at a time, and shows you what happens at each step instead of only where you land. For every hop it reports the HTTP status code, the Location header the server sent, and how long that hop took. That matters because a browser hides the chain: you type one URL, you see one page, and the three redirects in between are invisible until something breaks.

Still have questions? Book a strategy call with Johannes

See the same read across your whole site

This checks one chain at a time. If you want crawler access, structured data and citation-readiness checked across the site, run the free AI SEO audit or book a strategy call. Both are free, and you keep the output either way.