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HTTP Header Analyzer

HTTP response headers control how browsers cache content, how search engines index pages, and how secure your site is against common attacks. They also reveal server software, CDN configuration, and anti-bot behavior that matters when building scrapers or debugging web applications. This tool sends a real HTTP request to any URL and displays every response header with explanations of what each one does.

Enter a URL to analyze its HTTP response headers. The tool sends an actual HTTP request from our servers and displays the full response header set, including status code, caching directives, security headers, server identification, and any custom headers. Choose GET, HEAD, or POST methods, optionally follow redirects to see the full chain, and set a custom user-agent to test how servers respond to different clients.

How it works

  1. 1Enter the URL you want to analyze. The tool accepts any publicly accessible HTTP or HTTPS URL.
  2. 2Select the HTTP method. GET retrieves the full response, HEAD fetches only headers (faster), and POST lets you test form endpoints.
  3. 3Choose whether to follow redirects. When enabled, the tool shows each redirect hop with its own status code and headers, so you can trace the full redirect chain.
  4. 4Optionally set a custom User-Agent string to see how the server responds to different clients — useful for debugging bot detection or checking mobile-specific responses.
  5. 5Click Analyze. The tool sends the request, captures the complete response header set, and displays each header with its value and a brief explanation of its purpose.

Use cases

Debug caching issues — check Cache-Control, ETag, Last-Modified, and Expires headers to understand why content is or is not being cached.Audit security headers — verify that Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, Strict-Transport-Security, and other security headers are configured correctly.Trace redirect chains — follow 301/302/307 redirects step by step to diagnose SEO redirect issues, mixed content problems, or infinite redirect loops.Detect anti-bot behavior — compare headers returned for different user agents to see if a site serves different responses to scrapers versus browsers.Verify CDN configuration — check X-Cache, CF-Cache-Status, X-Served-By, and other CDN headers to confirm content is being served from the edge.SEO auditing — check canonical headers, X-Robots-Tag, hreflang, and HTTP status codes to identify indexing issues before they affect rankings.

FAQ

HTTP response headers are metadata sent by a web server alongside the requested content. They tell the browser (or any HTTP client) how to handle the response — whether to cache it, what content type it is, what security policies to enforce, and more. Common headers include Content-Type, Cache-Control, Set-Cookie, and Content-Security-Policy.

Headers reveal how a server identifies and handles different clients. Anti-bot systems use headers like Set-Cookie, CF-Mitigated, and custom challenge headers to manage bot detection. Analyzing headers helps you understand what a target site expects from legitimate clients, so you can configure your scraper to match.

GET retrieves the full response (headers and body). HEAD retrieves only the headers without the response body. HEAD is faster and uses less bandwidth, making it useful when you only need header information. Note that some servers may return slightly different headers for HEAD versus GET requests.

This tool sends unauthenticated requests, so it will show the headers returned to a public visitor. For authenticated endpoints, you would need to use a tool like curl or your browser's developer tools where you can include authentication cookies or tokens.

At minimum: Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) to enforce HTTPS, Content-Security-Policy (CSP) to prevent XSS, X-Content-Type-Options set to nosniff, X-Frame-Options to prevent clickjacking, and Referrer-Policy to control referrer leakage. This tool flags missing security headers so you can identify gaps.

Headers Are Just the Surface

Understanding HTTP headers helps you build better scrapers, but anti-bot systems check far more than headers. Archonum's real-device infrastructure handles TLS fingerprints, browser fingerprints, and behavioral signals automatically — so your requests pass every check.

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