Document: referrer property
Baseline
Widely available
This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.
The Document.referrer property returns the URI of the page that linked to
this page.
Value
The value is an empty string if the user navigated to the page directly (not through a link, but, for example, by using a bookmark). Because this property returns only a string, it doesn't give you document object model (DOM) access to the referring page.
Inside an <iframe>, the Document.referrer will initially
be set to the href of the parent's
Window.location in same-origin requests.
In cross-origin requests, it's the origin of the parent's Window.location by default.
For more information, see the Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin documentation.
Examples
The following will log a string containing the document's referrer.
console.log(document.referrer);
If the user navigated to the page via a link like <a href="https://www.w3.org/">W3</a>, then it will output the previous domain like developer.mozilla.org. If the user navigated to the page directly, it will output an empty string.
Specifications
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| HTML # dom-document-referrer-dev |
Browser compatibility
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Legend
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- Full support
- Full support