What should I use to find broken redirects and redirect chains at scale?

If you need to find broken redirects and redirect chains at scale, the best tool depends on how much control, speed, and integration you want.

Good options

1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

• Great for site crawls and finding:
  • 3xx redirect chains
  • broken redirects
  • redirect loops
  • mixed redirect issues
• Works well for medium-to-large sites.
• Can crawl a list of URLs or an entire site.
• Best if you want a desktop tool with strong reporting.

2. Sitebulb

• Similar to Screaming Frog, with strong visualization.
• Good for identifying:
  • redirect chains
  • orphan URLs
  • broken redirects
• Useful if you want more readable audits and reports.

3. Custom crawlers / scripts

If you mean very large scale or recurring checks across many domains, use a script or pipeline with:

• Python + requests/httpx + asyncio
• Node.js + undici/fetch
• Go for high concurrency
• Or use a headless crawler plus HTTP client logic

This is best for:

• tens/hundreds of thousands of URLs
• scheduled monitoring
• exporting results to BigQuery, Snowflake, Elasticsearch, etc.

4. Cloud SEO crawl platforms

Examples:

• Botify
• Lumar (Deepcrawl)
• Oncrawl

These are best for:

• enterprise-scale crawling
• repeated monitoring
• trend tracking
• integration with logs and analytics

They usually detect:

• redirect chains
• wasted hops
• broken redirect targets
• canonical/indexation issues related to redirects

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If you want the most practical recommendation

• Small to medium sites: Screaming Frog
• Enterprise / large-scale / recurring: Botify, Lumar, or Oncrawl
• Need fully automated, cheapest at scale: build a custom crawler

What to look for in a tool

Make sure it can:

• follow redirects hop-by-hop
• record every status code in the chain
• detect loops
• distinguish internal vs external redirects
• export chain length and final destination
• run concurrently without missing timeouts

If you want, I can also recommend:

1. the best tool for your site size, or
2. a Python/Node approach to detect redirect chains at scale.