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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T03:25:04+00:00

I log all the referrers to my site in PHP, and this always worked

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I log all the referrers to my site in PHP, and this always worked great. Now I noticed today that there were a lot of referrers from Google base domains like https://www.google.com

Of course there are no links to my site from that frontpage, so I started to do some research.

I log the referrer with this: $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] which works fine, most of the time.

But in Google Chrome, using the new standard Google Ajax pages, it doesn’t show the full referral link anymore.

So instead of showing this:

https://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=this+is+a+query&oq=this+is+a+query&gs_l=hp.3..33i29l4.19228.20509.0.21050.15.12.0.2.2.3.204.1289.7j4j1.12.0.les%3B..0.0…1c.1.WZ-VpIRpJ0o&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&bvm=bv.1357700187,d.d2k&fp=4af21ea2c089d08b&biw=1920&bih=922

It shows

https://www.google.com/

in my referral logs.

Is there anyway I can still get the full referral link when those Ajax type Google searches are performed?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    From April 2012 you can expect to see faster click through from Google search results as the search engine switches to the “referrer” meta tag to handle the referring URL from organic search results. The feature will be available only in browsers which support it (e.g. Chrome) 1.

    https

    Webmaster will start seeing Google homepage as origin referrer and source of organic traffic via SSL.
    refrecne:Google to Change HTTP Referrer

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