Redirect error in Search Console: chains, loops and broken redirect targets

Google could not follow the redirect: a chain too long, a loop, a URL too long or a bad URL in the chain. Redirect straight to the final page in one hop.

By the Crawlerpeek editorial team · Sources checked 2026-10-30 · Updated 2026-10-30 · Editorial standards

What Google says

Google experienced one of the following redirect errors:

• A redirect chain that was too long
• A redirect loop
• A redirect URL that eventually exceeded the max URL length
• A bad or empty URL in the redirect chain

Source: Google Search Console Help: Page indexing report, read 2026-10-30.

Common causes

• A chain of redirects that each fix one thing: http to https, then to www, then to a trailing slash, then to a new path. Google's crawlers follow up to 10 redirect hops by default (HTTP status codes and Google Search).
• A loop: two rules that send the URL back and forth, for example a CMS that removes the trailing slash and a server or CDN rule that adds it.
• A redirect that appends the old path or query string to the new one each time, until the URL is too long.
• An empty, malformed or relative Location header, or a redirect to a URL that does not resolve.

How to check

1. List every hop with curl -sIL https://example.com/old | grep -i -E '^(HTTP|location)'. More than one location line means a chain.
2. Enter the start URL in the AI crawler checker or see a page as a bot: the result shows the final address and its status.
3. Run URL Inspection's live test on the URL in Search Console, fix the rule, then click Validate fix.

When to fix it and when to leave it

Do not ignore it for a page you want indexed. If the redirecting URL is old and you no longer need it, a plain 404 is acceptable: Google says 404 responses are not necessarily a problem if the page has been removed without any replacement. A redirect that works is a different, usually harmless message: Page with redirect.

AI crawlers and AI search

Google says long redirect chains have a negative effect on crawling (crawl budget guide). Every hop is another request for every crawler that follows it, so a single direct redirect is the safe choice for search and AI crawlers alike. For /robots.txt, Google follows at least five hops and then treats the file as a 404 (Google's robots.txt specification); check yours with the robots.txt validator.

Check the URL: robots.txt per bot, HTTP status, noindex and the HTML a crawler gets.Run the checker