A redirect chain is not worth fixing when it is a single short hop sitting on a low-traffic, low-value URL where the cost of fixing it outruns the marginal gain. A one-hop chain on a page nobody visits and nothing important links to can sit untouched indefinitely. The decision is not “are there chains,” it is “does fixing this one return more than it costs,” and on a trivial page the honest answer is usually no.
The reason this holds is that a redirect chain’s real cost scales with how much traffic and link equity flows through it. Each extra hop adds a little latency for users and a small dilution of the signal passing through, but on a URL that gets a handful of visits a month and carries no inbound links, that cost is close to zero. Spending engineering or editorial time to collapse a clean one-hop redirect on such a page buys you almost nothing measurable. The effort would be better aimed elsewhere.
Where the math flips is on long chains and high-value paths. A chain of three, four, or more hops genuinely wastes crawl budget, slows real users, and can leak equity at each step, so those get fixed regardless of the page. So does any chain, even a single hop, sitting on a URL that earns traffic, holds backlinks, or sits on a path to a money page, because there the marginal gain is real. The pivot is always fix-cost versus marginal-gain, not a blanket rule to chase every redirect to perfection. As a working approach, treat one-hop chains on trivial URLs as acceptable and reserve cleanup time for chains that are long or that matter.
Before you open a redirect audit, sort the findings by hop count and by the value of the destination, then draw the line. Leave the single short hops on low-traffic, low-value URLs alone, and spend your fix time collapsing the long chains and the chains on pages that earn traffic, links, or revenue. That is where the cleanup actually pays back.