HTTP referer
HTTP header field that identifies the address of the webpage that linked to the resource being requested
In HTTP, "Referer" (a misspelling of "Referrer") is an optional HTTP header field that identifies the address of the web page (i.e., the URI or IRI) from which the resource has been requested. By checking the referrer, the server providing the new web page can see where the request originated.
In the most common situation, this means that when a user clicks a hyperlink in a web browser, causing the browser to send a request to the server holding the destination web page, the request may include the Referer field, which indicates the last page the user was on (the one where they clicked the link).
Web sites and web servers log the content of the received Referer field to identify the web page from which the user followed a link, for promotional or statistical purposes. This entails a loss of privacy for the user and may introduce a security risk. To mitigate security risks, browsers have been steadily reducing the amount of information sent in Referer. As of March 2021, by default Chrome, Chromium-based Edge, Firefox, Safari default to sending only the origin in cross-origin requests, stripping out everything but the domain name.
Etymology
The misspelling of referrer was introduced in the original proposal by computer scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker to incorporate the "Referer" header field into the HTTP specification. The misspelling was set in stone by the time (May 1996) of its incorporation into the Request for Comments standards document RFC 1945 (which "reflects common usage of the protocol referred to as 'HTTP/1.0'" at that time); document co-author Roy Fielding remarked in March 1995 that "neither one (referer or referrer) is understood by" the standard Unix spell checker of the period. "Referer" has since become a widely used spelling in the industry when discussing HTTP referrers; usage of the misspelling is not universal, though, as the correct spelling "referrer" is used in some web specifications such as the Referrer-Policy HTTP header or the Document Object Model.
The public source identifies “HTTP referer” as hTTP header field that identifies the address of the webpage that linked to the resource being requested. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around HTTP, referer and header.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q936009. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021, 1996, 1945 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “HTTP referer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.