Redirect Chain Checker: See Every Hop a Shortened URL Takes Before You Click It

Shortened links are everywhere — in tweets, emails, ads, and QR codes — but they all share the same problem: you can't see where they actually go until you click them. That's a real risk. A bit.ly or t.co link can hide a phishing page, an affiliate redirect chain that tanks page speed, or a URL that's quietly changed destination since it was first shared.

What it does

Redirect Chain Checker & URL Expander takes any URL — shortened or not — and follows every hop in its redirect chain until it lands on the final destination. For each hop it shows:

• The HTTP status code (301, 302, 307, meta-refresh, etc.)
• The exact URL at that hop
• The Location header it redirected to
• How long that hop took, in milliseconds

At the end you get the final destination URL, the final status code, total hop count, and total round-trip time — plus a flag if the original URL is a known shortener (bit.ly, t.co, and similar).

How to use it

1. Paste a URL into the input — a shortened link, a tracking/redirect URL, or any link you want to verify.
2. Click "Expand URL."
3. Read the chain top to bottom: each row is one redirect hop, with its status code and where it pointed next.
4. Copy the final destination URL with one click if you just need the end result.

No signup, no rate-limit wall, no browser extension to install.

Why it's useful

Checking links before you click them. If a shortened URL arrives in an email or DM from someone you don't fully trust, expanding it first tells you the real destination without ever loading it in your browser.

Debugging redirect chains on your own site. Multiple hops between a URL and its final page (HTTP → HTTPS → www → final path, for example) add latency and can dilute SEO signal. Seeing the full chain — and how long each hop takes — makes it obvious where to add a direct redirect instead of chaining three of them.

Verifying affiliate and tracking links. Marketing links often bounce through two or three redirect services before reaching the actual landing page. If a campaign link is slow or breaks, the hop-by-hop timing shows exactly which redirect in the chain is the bottleneck.

Auditing 301 vs 302 usage. Permanent (301) versus temporary (302/307) redirects matter for SEO and caching. The status code shown at each hop makes it easy to spot a redirect that should be permanent but is set up as temporary, or vice versa.

Try it free

No signup required: https://nutilz.com/redirect-checker

Free tools should just work — no account walls, no upsells, no tracking your own lookups. That's the whole philosophy behind nutilz.com's tool collection.