A redirect audit produces a path: the URL requested, each hop, and the final destination. The order is the whole point, so ordinary deduplication would destroy the data.
What the repeated neighbours mean
A URL appearing twice in a row in a redirect trace usually indicates a loop or a redirect to itself — both of which are faults worth finding. Collapsing them makes the genuine sequence readable while preserving the order.
Reading the cleaned chain
A trace that still shows four distinct hops after collapsing is a real four-hop chain. Each hop loses a little of the signal being passed along and adds latency for the visitor, and anything past two hops is worth flattening.
The fix is always the same
Point the original URL directly at the final destination. Chains accumulate because each migration adds a hop to the previous one rather than rewriting the map from the original source.
Try it: Remove Consecutive Duplicate Lines on SeoWolf's Notepad.