Canonical chain: what it means and how to fix it

What we look for

The canonical tag (the line naming a page's preferred address) on these pages points to a crawled page whose own canonical tag points somewhere else again.

Why it matters

Search engines may not follow the second step, and may ignore the tags and choose the version to show themselves.

How to fix

Point each canonical tag straight at the final preferred address, the page whose own canonical tag names itself.

Where you’ll see it

The id is stable, and every surface uses it, so it’s the thing to search for or hand to an agent.

Terminal: When it is one of the five findings under Fix first, raptor crawl prints the id under it.
Check: canonicals.canonical_chain
crawl.json and the CSV: The crawl JSON names the finding by this id, and so do the CSV and raptor_query.
"check_id": "canonicals.canonical_chain"
The HTML report: This link opens the finding in the report, and each finding shows its id.
crawl.html#finding=canonicals.canonical_chain
MCP: raptor_findings with this check_id returns the finding in full, with a fix brief ready to paste into a task. If it didn’t fire, it says why.
raptor_findings { "job_id": "...", "check_id": "canonicals.canonical_chain" }