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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

    Redirect chains waste AI crawler budget and slow down content discovery. Each page should resolve in a single redirect at most.

    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.

    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 2026-08-21)
    • 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 — developers.google.com/…/http-network-errors (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Google’s crawl-budget guidance states the effect outright: “Avoid long redirect chains, which have a negative effect on crawling.” — developers.google.com/…/large-site-managing-crawl-b… (verified 2026-08-21)
    • 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. The audit as implemented flags any request URL that differs from its final URL — a threshold with no support in any source cited here, and one that is inert in production because finalUrl is assigned targetUrl unconditionally.

    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 2026-08-21) — 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