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/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.

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

The Referer header has the potential to reveal information about the browsing history of the user, which is a privacy concern.

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 compatibility

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