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.

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") 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 compatibility

See also

• HTTP referer on Wikipedia
• Referrer-Policy