Redirect & Canonical Checker

How this check works

The tool requests the URL you enter and follows each redirect response in turn, up to a small hop limit, recording where the chain finishes. Redirect status codes and the Location header they carry are defined by the HTTP specification, so a chain can be read without running any page code. It then parses the HTML of that final page and reads the link element whose rel attribute is canonical. The comparison is a normalised string match between the canonical value and the final URL. Google documents canonicalization as the process of choosing one address to represent duplicate pages, and the canonical link is one of the signals it accepts for that choice.

Example

Requesting http://example.com/page?ref=newsletter may finish at https://example.com/page after two redirects. If the fetched page declares https://example.com/page as its canonical, this tool reports a redirect detected, HTTPS enabled, the canonical tag found, and the canonical matching the final URL.

How to read the result

A mismatch is not automatically a defect. It means the page prefers a different address than the one that answered, which is intentional on paginated, filtered, or syndicated pages and unintentional when a template hardcodes one address. A missing canonical tag simply means none was declared in the fetched HTML; search engines then pick an address themselves.

Limits: this check reads raw HTML only and does not run JavaScript, so a canonical injected by a script is not visible to it. It also cannot show which address Google actually selected for its index.

Related checks: ads.txt Checker · Required Pages Checker

Free tool boundary

This tool reports a limited set of public, deterministic signals. It does not provide an AI score, a policy decision, or an approval prediction.