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Agent LighthouseAgent Lighthouse

    Searches the text of every published page. The evidence sources themselves are not in this index — search all of them on the trusted sources page.

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    access-crawl-control/no-redirect-chains

    No redirect chains

    What it checks

    Whether the scanned pages were reached through a redirect chain. A page counts when the scan needed two or more redirect hops to reach it. One hop on the same site, such as http to https, bare domain to www, or a trailing-slash fix, does not count.

    A single hop that leaves the site counts too. “The site” is the registrable domain, so example.com to www.example.com stays on it, and a redirect to a parking host does not.

    State Result
    no page scanned na
    no counted page pass
    half the scanned pages or fewer counted warn, priority low
    more than half counted fail, priority medium

    Why it matters

    A URL reachable only through more redirect hops than the crawler’s limit is never fetched; Googlebot’s limit is 10 hops. Long chains also consume crawl capacity that would otherwise be spent on real content. The page is therefore not indexed — and since indexing is a precondition for Google’s AI surfaces, it cannot be cited there. The harm Google names is the chain, so the audit counts a page only from its second hop. A single hop that leaves the site is counted on its own: Google processes the target’s content instead of the requested URL’s, so the requested site’s content is never what gets indexed.

    Evidence

    • “By default, Google’s crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops. However, specific products’ crawlers may have different limits.” — an explicit, falsifiable behaviour of a named agent on this exact signal — developers.google.com/…/http-network-errors (verified 2026-10-17)
    • Same page: “Any content Google receives from the redirecting URL is ignored, and the final target URL’s content is processed instead”, so every intermediate hop is a wasted fetch, and a hop to another site hands the URL another site’s content — developers.google.com/…/http-network-errors (verified 2026-10-17)
    • Google’s crawl-budget guidance states the effect outright: “Avoid long redirect chains, which have a negative effect on crawling.” The defect is the chain, not the redirect — developers.google.com/…/large-site-managing-crawl-b… (verified 2026-10-17)
    • The consequence for AI surfaces is documented: “To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet.” An unfetchable URL is not indexed — developers.google.com/…/ai-features (verified 2026-08-21)

    Limits

    The documented harm attaches to long chains, and to exceeding the hop limit. No vendor documents any penalty for a single redirect, and Google states the target’s content is simply “processed instead”. That makes routine http-to-https, bare→www and trailing-slash normalisations non-defects, and the audit no longer counts them. Two hops is the shortest chain, so it is where the audit starts counting. No source names a chain length below Google’s 10-hop limit as harmful, so a two-hop chain is judged on crawl cost, not on a documented cut-off.

    No AI-specific vendor publishes a hop limit for its own fetchers. OpenAI’s crawler documentation (developers.openai.com/…/bots) and Perplexity’s (docs.perplexity.ai/…/perplexity-crawlers) cover robots.txt only, and say nothing about redirects (both verified 2026-08-21), so the proven consumer path here is Googlebot’s, inherited by Google’s AI features. Google’s own redirect guidance page does not discuss chain length or PageRank loss at all (developers.google.com/…/301-redirects, verified 2026-10-17) — the “chains dilute link equity” claim common in SEO blogs has no primary source and is not relied on here.

    How it scores

    Google publishes the exact hop limit its named crawlers apply and states directly that long chains harm crawling.

    Sources