Technical SEO Autopilot: Auto-Fixed Redirect Chains

A few months back, we wrote that we were close to shipping full auto-heal, and specifically called out chains: *"For chains (A → B → C), we flatten them to a single hop at the edge. No more redirect chains accumulating over time."*

That's live today. We're calling the direction Technical SEO Autopilot — not a single feature, but a growing set of fixes RedirectIQ applies on its own, starting with the case that had the clearest answer.

The problem we were quietly not solving

If you've had Edge Proxy enabled, RedirectIQ has always followed your origin's own redirect chains for you. If /old-page internally chained through /interim to /final-page, your visitors already landed on the right content — instantly, invisibly, no extra hop they'd notice.

But we were serving that final content as a 200, at the old URL. That's fine for a human visitor. It's not fine for a search engine crawler, which reads a 200 very differently than a 301. A permanent redirect tells Google "consolidate everything pointing at this old URL onto the new one." A silent 200 doesn't — so link equity that should have flowed to /final-page just sat there, unclaimed. Every request also meant re-walking the entire chain against your origin server, forever, instead of resolving once.

We were detecting these chains the whole time. We just weren't doing anything with the good ones — only the chains that looked like they'd landed on a broken or missing page got surfaced for you to review. A chain that resolved cleanly to real content was quietly discarded. Nobody ever saw it.

What changes today

When RedirectIQ detects a chain that resolves to real content, it now writes a real 301 redirect automatically — straight from the original URL to the final destination. One hop. No review queue, no waiting on you to notice and fix it by hand.

This is deliberately the narrowest, safest slice of "automatic" we could ship first: your own origin already told us the answer by redirecting there itself. There's no scoring, no fuzzy matching, no guessing involved — which is exactly why it's the first thing we automated instead of the last. Broken pages with no confirmed destination still show up in your Suggestions queue for you to review, same as always. Guessing where a 404 should go is a fundamentally different, harder problem, and we're not going to auto-write a redirect we're not certain about.

Every autopilot-created rule is a completely normal rule in your dashboard — same table, same audit trail, editable or deletable exactly like anything you'd have created by hand. Autopilot is on by default and free on every plan, including Hobby, but it's a per-domain toggle if you'd rather review every chain yourself first.

What we're building next

This is the first piece of Technical SEO Autopilot, not the whole thing. The direction: a growing share of what RedirectIQ detects gets fixed automatically, not just reported — starting with fixes that are unambiguous redirect rules, which is where the honest, safe wins are. Fixes that would require rewriting a page's actual HTML (a missing meta description, a missing canonical tag) are a genuinely different and harder problem, and we're not going to pretend otherwise by quietly injecting content into your pages — that's not the direction this is heading.

If you haven't enabled Edge Proxy yet, that's the one prerequisite — see how it works. Everything downstream, including Autopilot, builds on the same signal.