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.

js
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

Specification
HTML
# dom-document-referrer-dev

Browser compatibility

Report problems with this compatibility data on GitHub
desktopmobile
Chrome
Edge
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Chrome Android
Firefox for Android
Opera Android
Safari on iOS
Samsung Internet
WebView Android
WebView on iOS
referrer

Legend

Tip: you can click/tap on a cell for more information.

Full support
Full support