A 301 redirect passes ~85-90% of PageRank. A chain of 2 redirects passes ~75-80%. A chain of 3+ passes increasingly less, and AI crawlers have tight retry budgets that give up entirely past a certain hop count.
The Redirect Chain Audit bulk-follows up to 200 URLs via the serverless proxy and reports:
- Full hop chain per URL
- Final status code (2xx / 3xx / 4xx / 5xx)
- Chain length
- Mixed-protocol hops (https→http downgrade flagged as critical)
- Meta-refresh chains (server-detected refresh tags mid-chain)
- Canonical tag mismatch at the final URL (canonical points somewhere else — misconfigured)
The four categories of failure
- Chain > 2 hops. Collapse to one hop. Emit an updated 301 pointing directly from origin to final.
- HTTP downgrade mid-chain. Any
https→httphop is a security regression and a trust signal to Google. - Meta-refresh in mid-chain. Sometimes unavoidable (legacy systems), but Google treats meta-refresh as a soft 301 — weaker than HTTP 301.
- Canonical != final URL. The page has a
<link rel="canonical">pointing somewhere other than its own URL, which tells Google to merge signals elsewhere. Sometimes intentional (duplicate-content canonical). Usually a misconfiguration worth checking.
Typical first-run output
For a site that's been through multiple migrations: 15-25% of URLs in a large sitemap have some chain length > 1. Of those, 20-30% are > 2 hops. The AI fix prompt emits the 301 config in Netlify _redirects + Apache .htaccess + nginx formats, collapsing chains to one hop each.
For a clean site: < 5% have chains. The worthwhile hits are the remaining mixed-protocol or canonical-mismatch flags, which are rarer but more impactful per fix.
Related reading
- Broken Link Fix Generator — emits the redirect config
- Sitemap Audit — validates XML sitemap
- Index Coverage Delta — diffs live vs sitemap
- Internal Link Auditor — finds 404s inside your site
Fact-check notes and sources
- PageRank leak through redirects: developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/07/301-redirects-and-canonicalization (Google has said repeated 301s pass "most" of the signal)
- Screaming Frog redirect audit: screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider
- Meta-refresh vs 301: developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects
The $100 Network covers redirect hygiene across site migrations and domain consolidations. The audit is the measurement pass; the Broken Link Fix Generator is the emit-config pass.
