What does the redirect hygiene check verify?
It follows the URL's redirect chain from start to finish and evaluates how clean that path is. It looks at several things:
- Hop count — how many redirects it takes to reach the final page. Direct or one hop is healthy.
- Redirect type — whether a permanent move uses a
301(passes ranking signal) or a302/307(temporary, which doesn't transfer value the same way). - Loops — a chain that points back on itself and never resolves, trapping the crawler.
- Chain end — whether the chain finishes at a real
200page or at an error.
A direct 200 or a single clean 301 passes; two hops is a warning; three or more, a loop, or a chain ending in an error fails.
How is it evaluated, and how is it scored?
GEObubbly requests the URL and follows each Location redirect, recording every hop and its status code until it reaches a final response — flagging loops and noting where a 302 is used for what looks like a permanent move. It's a core check worth 2 points in Crawlability & Indexability and runs partially, since following the full chain depends on the live server responses.
Why clean redirects matter for SEO and GEO
Every extra redirect hop adds latency and consumes crawl budget — the limited number of requests an engine will spend on your site. On large sites, chains can mean important pages get crawled less often. Each hop also risks losing a little ranking signal, and using a 302 for a permanent move tells engines not to pass authority to the new URL at all, which can quietly suppress the destination's rankings. For GEO the stakes are higher still: AI fetchers run on tight timeouts and are quicker than search bots to abandon a slow, redirect-heavy URL before reaching the content — so a chain can keep you out of AI answers entirely. The fix is simple: point each redirect straight at the final destination with the correct 301, so there's at most one hop. Clean redirects keep the rest of the Crawlability & Indexability signals working and the page fast for both search and AI.