Site migration
A site migration is anything that changes the ground under your visibility: a new platform, a new domain, a new URL structure, or a redesign that touches content and code. We take ownership of the SEO track in the project, so rankings, traffic and citations in AI answers come along to the new site. It usually runs as a focused sprint, planned around one deadline: your launch date.
Your visibility has been built over years: indexed pages, backlinks, signals, and the sources AI answers already cite. A migration moves all of it at once, and the quality of the plan decides how much arrives safely on the other side.
You get one SEO track running alongside design and development: what has to be decided when, who owns what, and what has to be in place before the new site goes live. That way SEO is not the thing somebody remembers the week before launch.
A migration is no threat to your visibility. An unplanned one is.
Search engines and AI engines alike know your site as it looks today: the URLs that rank, the content that gets cited, the internal links that spread authority. When the structure changes, each of those signals has to be led over to the new site with precise 1:1 redirects, or the pages start from scratch.
That applies in both places. Classic rankings follow the URL, and AI answers in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews cite specific pages. If those citations point at dead addresses, the models find another source. A thorough migration plan keeps that source being you.
The plan is finished before the new site goes live.
Before launch we measure the baseline: rankings, traffic, indexed pages, and the URLs that get cited in AI answers. Then we map every old URL to its new address and build the redirect plan 1:1, page by page instead of in bulk.
In the run-up to launch we test on staging: redirects, canonicals, hreflang, internal links, metadata and indexing. We also review the content that moves across, so the pages driving business today do not get shortened or merged in the rush.
After launch we watch it daily: crawl errors, indexing status, redirect chains, and the numbers measured against the baseline. If something deviates from what we expected, we act straight away, while it is still cheap to fix.
What the SEO track covers
A plan for the whole SEO track: decisions, ownership and deadlines up to launch, plus a complete 1:1 mapping of old URLs to new ones, prioritized by traffic, rankings and citations in AI answers.
Most is at stake with a new CMS, a new domain, or when several sites become one.
You are changing platform or redesigning, and the launch date is fixed. The earlier the SEO track comes in, the more decisions get made right the first time, while changing them still costs nothing.
You are consolidating brands or domains, changing URL structure, or moving to a new domain. Here you move authority and citations at scale, and the quality of the mapping decides what comes along.
What we typically look at in a migration
The starting point is a full map of the existing site: which URLs drive traffic and rankings, which ones attract backlinks, and which ones get cited in AI answers. That tells us where most is at stake, and where the mapping has to be most careful.
We build the redirect plan 1:1. Every old URL has to point at the new page that best matches the intent, rather than landing on the homepage or some arbitrary category page. We keep the chains short and make sure redirects from earlier moves are not stacked on top of each other.
The content has to arrive in the same quality it left. Pages that rank and get cited do so because of their content, structure and entity coverage. If they get shortened, merged or rewritten during the move, the basis disappears, however tidy the redirects behind them are.
We review the technical setup on the new site before launch: crawlability, indexing, canonicals, hreflang across languages, sitemaps and speed. A platform change is also the chance to fix the technical debt the old site has been carrying around.
In the weeks after launch we watch both tracks: indexing and rankings in classic search, and whether AI answers still find and cite the new URLs. Morrison has the whole site read in, so we spot deviations quickly and can act while they are small.
Recovery is part of the deliverable. Minor fluctuation after a migration is normal. Our job is to tell expected turbulence apart from real problems, and to act on the second kind immediately. Several of the engagements in our cases have run on exactly that discipline.
The launch date is fixed. Is the plan for your visibility fixed too?
Book a call about your migrationFrequently asked questions
Ideally before the URL structure and the information architecture are locked. The most expensive mistakes in a migration are decisions that cost nothing to change on a whiteboard and a lot to change after launch. If the project is already running, we join it where it stands.
We own the SEO track and deliver what they need: URL mapping, redirect plan, technical requirements and QA on staging. Most development teams would rather have precise specifications than loose wishes, and we speak their language.
Minor fluctuation in the weeks around launch is normal, because the search engines have to reindex the site. The point of the plan is to keep the dip small and short, and to catch it immediately if something deviates. We measure against the baseline from before launch, so the discussion never rests on gut feeling.
AI answers cite specific URLs. If the pages move without correct redirects, the citations point at dead addresses and the models find other sources. With precise mapping and unchanged content quality the citations come along, and we monitor them after launch the same way we monitor rankings.
Yes. Recovery starts by comparing the old and the new site: which URLs lost visibility, where redirects are missing or point in the wrong direction, and what content was changed along the way. From there we prioritize the fixes by how much visibility each one can win back. A free SEO analysis is a good place to start, so we can see where it went wrong.
Access to Search Console and Analytics, a list of your most important pages seen from the business side, access to staging once it exists, and a direct line to whoever is building the new site. We map the rest ourselves.
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