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).

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:password@example.com/foo/bar/") are not included.

Examples

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

Specifications

Browser compatibility

The compatibility table in this page is generated from structured data. If you'd like to contribute to the data, please check out https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data and send us a pull request.

See also

• HTTP referer on Wikipedia
• Referrer-Policy