W3cubDocs

/HTTP

Referer

The Referer request header contains the address of the previous web page from which a link to the currently requested page was followed. The Referer header allows servers to identify where people are visiting them from and may use that data for analytics, logging, or optimized caching, for example.

Important: Although this header has many innocent uses it can have undesirable consequences for user security and privacy. See Referer header: privacy and security concerns for more information and mitigations.

Note that referer is actually a misspelling of the word "referrer". See HTTP referer on Wikipedia for more details.

A Referer header is not sent by browsers if:

the referring resource is a local "file" or "data" URI,
an unsecured HTTP request is used and the referring page was received with a secure protocol (HTTPS).

Header type	Request header
Forbidden header name	yes

Syntax

Referer: <url>

Directives

<url>: An absolute or partial address of the previous web page from which a link to the currently requested page was followed. URL fragments (i.e. "#section") and userinfo (i.e. "username:password" in "https://username:[email protected]/foo/bar/") are not included.

Examples

Referer: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript

Specifications

Specification	Title
RFC 7231, section 5.5.2: Referer	Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content

Browser compatibilityUpdate compatibility data on GitHub

	Desktop
	Chrome	Edge	Firefox	Internet Explorer	Opera	Safari
Basic support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes