Site Migration Checklist for AI Search

Most site migration checklists are built to protect one thing: your Google rankings. They tell you to map your old addresses to your new ones, set up redirects, and watch your traffic. All of that is right, and you should do it.

But a move can also change things those checklists never look at. It can change whether AI crawlers can reach and read your pages. It can quietly drop the business details AI uses to describe you, like your address and phone number. It can delete or rename the About and Contact pages that show who is behind the site. And none of that shows up in a rankings report, so you can finish a "successful" migration and only find out months later that ChatGPT now gets your business wrong.

This checklist covers that missing half. It leaves rankings and redirects to the guides that already do them well (Google's own is linked below), and it is built around one simple idea: take a snapshot of your site before you move, then compare against it after. Without a "before," you cannot tell a real problem from normal change.

First, What Kind of Move Is It?

"Migration" covers four quite different jobs, and each one breaks different things. Work out which one you are doing, because it tells you which parts of this checklist matter most.

Kind of move	What changes	What usually breaks
Redesign, same web addresses	Page templates and layout	Details that lived in the old templates: page headings, the footer with your address, and the hidden markup that states facts about your business (called structured data)
New platform (a new website builder or content system)	Templates and how content is stored, often the web addresses too	Structured data added by the old system's plugins, plus page addresses that change
New domain or new address structure	Every web address	Redirects, links from other sites, profiles that point to your old domain
New hosting only	Nothing on the page	Blocks left over from testing, which carry across to the live site

Google publishes separate guidance for the address-changing kinds (its site moves guide) and the hosting-only kind (its hosting guide). Read whichever matches your move alongside this post.

Here is a made-up example we will use throughout. A family-run flooring company moves from an old WordPress theme to a new site builder. The new site looks great. But the new footer template shows a placeholder phone number, the About page is now called "Our Story," and the structured data the old SEO plugin used to add is simply gone. Rankings hold up fine. Six weeks later, an AI assistant asked how to contact the company gives an old phone number, and a competitor's name comes up when you ask who serves the area. Nothing in the redirect checklist would have caught any of it.

Before You Move: Take a Snapshot

Do this at least a day before launch. The reason for the "at least a day" is explained in step 1.

1. Run a full AI readiness check on the live site, and save the report. Run a free AI readiness check on your site (up to 100 pages) while signed in. Signed out, the check only runs a two-question preview of the Answer part and leaves it unscored, so you would be missing one of your four scores. Then download the report as a PDF. Write down the total score and the four pillar scores. A pillar is one of the four parts of the score: Discover (can AI crawlers reach the site), Read (can they make sense of the pages), Understand (can they tell who runs the business), and Answer (can AI answer basic questions about you). This is your "before." Our checker keeps a 24-hour gap per web address and hands back the earlier result if you check the same address again within that window. So if you run your "before" check on the morning of launch and your "after" check that afternoon, you will be shown the same result twice and think nothing changed. Run the "before" a day or more ahead. Our audit guide explains how to read the report.

2. List the addresses that matter. Start with your sitemap, which is usually a list of your most important pages. Google's own advice is to start with your important addresses and map each one to where it will live on the new site. If any of your pages are picked up by links from other sites, keep those on the list too.

3. Write down your business details exactly as they stand. Business name, street address, phone number, email address, opening hours, the services you offer, the areas you serve, and who runs the company. Copy them from your current contact page, not from memory. This list is what you will compare the new site against. If you have never set these down in one place, this is also a good moment to build your entity profile, which is exactly this list, stored once and used everywhere.

4. Note which trust pages you have, and their addresses. Trust pages are the pages that show a real business stands behind the site: About, Contact, Privacy and Terms, plus author pages if you publish articles with bylines. Our audit looks for them by web address, matching addresses that contain /about, /contact, /privacy, /terms and /author. So /about-us is found and /who-we-are is not, even though a person would recognize both. Write down what you have now.

5. Ask AI six plain questions and save the answers. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the same six things the Answer part of our check asks: what does this company do, where is it located, which areas does it serve, what services or products does it offer, who runs or founded it, and how would a customer contact it. Paste the answers into a document with today's date. Our guide to the Answer pillar calls this the open-book test: it shows what the wider internet says about you, not just what your own site says. That is exactly what a move can change, because old profiles and links keep feeding AI the old details. (The site-only version, where a model gets nothing but your own pages, is what the Answer part of the signed-in check runs.) Your saved answers are the only way to see later whether AI's picture of you changed.

You now have a saved report, a list of addresses, a list of business facts, a list of trust pages and six saved AI answers. Everything after this compares against those.

Check the New Site Before It Goes Live

Do not wait until launch day to find problems. If your new site is on a test address, look at it first. Our free Chrome extension, described on the extension page, gives one page at a time a score out of 100 and shows its structured data, canonical link and indexing setting. It works on a site that sits behind a login or on a test address, because it reads the page in your own browser. Check one page of each type: the home page, a service or product page, the About page, the Contact page and a blog post.

For each page type, look at these:

• Does the page have structured data? This is the behind-the-scenes markup that states facts like your name and address in a form machines read directly. If the old site got it from a plugin and the new one has nothing, this is the most common quiet loss in a migration. Our post on schema that disappears after a deploy lists the ways it happens.
• Do the addresses inside it point to the right place? Look for the test address showing up in the canonical link (the tag that says which address is the official one for this page), inside the structured data (for example in the website address or logo address it gives), and in your social profile links. A test address left inside these fields ships to the live site unchanged.
• Are your business details present, and are they the same everywhere? Compare the footer, contact page and structured data against your saved list. Our audit compares the name, phone number, address and website your site gives in different places, and it scores a site down when they conflict with each other. A placeholder phone number in one template and the real one in another counts as a conflict.
• Are the trust pages there? Check that About, Contact, Privacy and Terms exist on the new site, and note their addresses against your list from step 4.
• Is any page told to stay out of search? During development it is common to switch on a setting that blocks indexing. That is correct on the test site and disastrous if it survives to launch. Our guide to hidden noindex settings covers where these hide (page code, server headers and platform settings).

Launch Day: Redirects and Blocks

If your web addresses change, this is the part that Google's guides cover well, so here is the short version, and the reasons they matter for AI too.

Set up permanent redirects from every old address to its new equivalent. Google recommends permanent redirects, set up on your server (the codes are 301 or 308), from the old addresses to the new ones, and says to avoid chains where one redirect leads to another. AI systems that follow a link to an old address land in the same place a visitor would, so a broken redirect breaks that path for them too.

Do not send everything to the home page. Google warns against redirecting many old addresses to one unrelated destination such as the new home page, because that can be treated as a "soft 404" (a page that acts like an error). Map each old page to its closest new page. If a page is gone for good, let it return a real "not found" response instead.

Keep the redirects a long time. Google's guidance is to "keep the redirects for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year," which gives its systems time to pass everything across to the new addresses. If you use Google's Change of Address tool for a domain move, the minimum on that page is 180 days, and Google suggests continuing to pay for the old domain so nobody else can buy it. Redirect every version of the old address too: with and without www, and any subdomains (addresses such as blog.yoursite.com).

Remove the test-site blocks. If you blocked crawlers or used a noindex setting while building, remove it as the move starts. Google's hosting-move guide says the same: remove any temporary blocks from the new copy of the site when you are ready to start. Prepare what the new robots.txt file (the file that tells crawlers which pages they may visit) should say ahead of time, because forgetting is the usual failure. Also check that AI crawlers are not caught by a rule meant for something else.

Update the places that still point to the old site. Google's guide says to update your own links and any high-volume links from other sites once the move starts. For AI, the list is a bit longer: your Google Business Profile website, LinkedIn and other social profiles, directory listings, and the links in your structured data that point to your own profiles (the sameAs links). If you publish an llms.txt file (a file that lists your key pages for AI), its links need updating too. Submit your new sitemap, and check that it lists the new addresses and not the old ones.

After Launch: Compare Against Your Snapshot

Wait at least 24 hours after launch, then repeat everything you did in the snapshot step and compare.

Run the readiness check again. Compare the four pillar scores against your saved report, not just the total. A total can hold steady while one pillar falls, and the pillar that fell tells you where to look:

If this pillar dropped	It usually means	Look here first
Discover	AI crawlers cannot reach or load pages	Leftover blocks, redirect loops, pages that only appear after scripts run
Read	The new templates changed how pages are built	Headings, canonical links, page titles, descriptions
Understand	The site lost details about who you are	Structured data, trust pages, conflicting business details
Answer	AI can no longer answer basic questions from your pages	Your saved business facts against what the site now says

Check the trust pages by address. If Understand fell after you renamed About to "Our Story," this is probably why. The audit finds trust pages by their addresses, so a page it cannot find by address counts as missing even though a person can see it. If nothing forces a new name, keep the conventional address.

Compare your business details again. Put your saved list beside the live footer, contact page and structured data. The most common problems are a placeholder still in one template, an old phone number in a footer nobody touched, and two versions of the same address on different pages.

Ask the six questions again, and be patient. Compare the new answers with the saved ones. Do not judge on day one. Google says that after a move, it can take a few weeks or more for medium-sized sites for its systems to gradually show the new addresses, and that rankings can move around during that time. We could not find a published timeline from any AI provider for how long it takes their answers to catch up, so treat a stale answer in the first few weeks as expected, and a stale answer after that as a sign to look at your pages, profiles and links.

Let a weekly check watch it for you. On paid plans, connected sites are re-checked every week. Each new check is compared with the one before, and if the score falls by 5 points or more (you can change that threshold per site), you get an email that names the pillars that fell the most and how many more pages now have no structured data. One limit matters for migrations: history is kept per exact web address, including whether it starts with www or uses https. If your address changes, the new address starts a fresh history, and nothing will compare it with the old one. In that case your saved "before" report is the comparison.

Common Mistakes

Running the "before" check the same day as the "after" check. Within 24 hours of a check on the same address, our tool shows you the earlier result. You will see no change, because you are looking at the same report.

Launching with the test-site block still switched on. It is the single most damaging leftover, and it is easy to miss because the site looks perfect to any visitor.

Redirecting every old page to the home page. It is fast to set up and it throws away the link between each old page and its replacement.

Checking only the home page. Templates differ. The home page can be fine while blog posts lose their structured data or service pages point their canonical link at the test address.

Renaming trust pages for no reason. "Our Story" reads nicely and gains you nothing. Keep About, Contact, Privacy and Terms at the addresses people and tools expect.

Leaving profiles pointing at the old domain. Your Google Business Profile, social profiles and directory listings are among the places AI systems look to check who you are. If they still list the old site, that contradicts your new one.

Having no "before." Without a saved report and saved business facts, "it seems fine" is the best anyone can say.