~/guides cat how-to-check-redirect-chains-in-chrome.md
Uses Scalpel RedirectsHow to check redirect chains in Chrome
Trace the real chain your browser follows, hop by hop, with headers and a wasted-hop verdict, using Scalpel Redirects.
You moved a site to HTTPS, or renamed a batch of URLs, and now you need to know that every old address lands on the right page in as few hops as possible. An online redirect checker re-fetches the URL from its own server, so it can miss redirects that only fire for logged-in users, a specific region, or a particular user agent.
Scalpel Redirects records the navigation your browser actually made, with your real cookies and session. Here's how to read a chain properly, in about three minutes.
Step by step
Pin the extension so the badge is visible
Load Scalpel Redirects (or install it from the Chrome Web Store once the listing is live) and pin its icon from the puzzle-piece menu. The toolbar badge shows each tab's redirect outcome before you even click, so you spot a redirecting page at a glance.
Open the URL you want to test
Paste the old URL into the address bar and press Enter. Scalpel Redirects watches the navigation passively; it never re-fetches the URL itself, so what you see is the chain that really happened for you, cookies and all.
Read the chain top to bottom
Click the icon. Each hop is a card, in order, with its status chip and the URL it pointed at. A chain that reads 301, then 302, then 200 means two redirects ran before the page loaded. The verdict line at the top sums it up in one sentence.
Expand a hop to read its headers
Open any hop to see every response header in its original order, plus hint chips for HSTS, X-Robots-Tag, the canonical header, Cache-Control, the server, the resolved IP, and whether it came from cache. This is how you catch a redirect that's quietly serving an X-Robots-Tag of noindex.
Look for wasted hops
Watch for the wasted-hop hints: a 301 pointing at another 301 that should collapse into one rule, or the classic http to https to www triple hop. Every extra hop is a network round trip the visitor waits through, so the goal is to point each entry URL straight at the final target.
Keep the trail when a client redirect fires
If the page bounces again through a meta refresh or JavaScript, the server chain would normally vanish before you can read it. Scalpel Redirects keeps the last 20 navigations per tab in a history strip, and links the client-side redirect back to the server chain that preceded it, so the full path stays visible.
Export the chain to diff later
Export the chain as JSON, Markdown, or CSV. Save it before a migration and again after, then diff the two files. That's the quickest way to catch a redirect that regressed during a launch.
Cross-check from the terminal
Want a second opinion outside the browser? This lists each hop's status and Location header:
# -L follows redirects, -I fetches headers only; each block is one hop
curl -sIL -A "Mozilla/5.0" https://old.example.com/page \
| grep -iE "^(HTTP/|location:)"curl won't see redirects that depend on your cookies or on JavaScript. That's exactly the gap the extension fills, since it watches your real navigation.