Phishing is an evolving form of cybercrime that targets users' sensitive information through URL manipulation. Conventional detection methods such as blacklists and signature-based approaches have become increasingly inadequate in addressing the dynamic variations of modern phishing attacks. This study evaluates the effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) variants, such Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), in detecting phishing threats based on URL data. The methodology involves a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of scholarly publications from the past ten years, complemented by experimental implementation of the models using a public dataset from Kaggle. Literature findings show that Bi-LSTM consistently achieves the highest accuracy, up to 99%, while GRU stands out for its computational efficiency. Experimental results support these findings, with Bi-LSTM achieving an accuracy of 96.22%, GRU 96.29%, and LSTM 95.43%. Classification metrics indicate that RNN-based models perform very well in detecting benign and defacement URLs, although their performance on phishing URLs remains challenged, particularly in terms of recall. These results confirm that RNNs remain a promising approach for phishing detection systems, especially when integrated into hybrid models with complementary architectures. This study is expected to provide a foundation for developing precise and adaptive AI systems to combat increasingly sophisticated phishing threats.
