Site Migration Checklist: Protect Your AI Citations Before You Redirect
A before, during and after checklist for site migrations that keeps pages cited in AI answers: baseline the URLs, map redirects, and verify with crawler logs.
Migrations are where AI visibility goes to quietly die. A new CMS, a new domain, a URL cleanup: all reasonable, and each one can sever the exact pages that models were citing. Classic SEO has a long migration playbook. The AI version adds one question: which of the pages we are about to move are currently being cited, and by what?
Before: build the baseline
You cannot protect what you did not measure. Two weeks before launch, capture:
- Cited URLs. From citation analytics, list every page of yours that appeared as a source in tracked prompts. Promptwatch's citation analytics are page- and domain-level, so you can export the set.
- Per-page citation depth. How many distinct prompts cited each page. Pages cited by many prompts are your crown jewels. Page Tracker shows responses, distinct prompts and last-cited date per URL.
- Crawler activity. Which URLs AI bots fetch, and which succeed. Agent Analytics provides this with IP verification.
- AI-referred visits. Visitor analytics shows which pages receive sessions from AI platforms and which convert.
Put these in one sheet. Mark every URL that appears in two or more lists as "protected." Those get special attention.
Add the protected URLs to the Page Tracker now, so you have a clean before-picture in the same tool you will use for the after-picture.
During: map and redirect with the protected list
One-to-one redirects for protected URLs
Do not send protected pages to a category page or the homepage. A model that fetched a specific answer page and lands on a generic hub finds nothing to cite. Redirect each protected URL to its true equivalent, with a permanent redirect, in a single hop.
Keep the content the model used
The page that was cited had specific sections: a table, a definition, a pricing breakdown. If your new template drops them, you have migrated the URL and deleted the reason it was cited. Compare old and new for the protected pages line by line.
Keep robots.txt and edge rules consistent
New infrastructure often brings new default firewall behavior. Confirm that the AI bots you want, such as OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot, are not challenged or rate-limited on the new stack. Staging rules that disallow everything are another common launch-day casualty.
Update the sitemap and internal links
Publish the new sitemap, and update internal links so crawlers do not walk through redirect chains. Fewer hops, fewer failures.
Re-point your tracking
Crawler log connections and visitor analytics scripts can break in a migration. Promptwatch's integrations work through Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, Akamai, Google Cloud CDN, a custom HTTP endpoint, or the WordPress plugin, and visitor analytics through a lightweight script, GTM template, or the plugin. If you change hosting, plan time to reconnect and test them. Losing data during the migration week is exactly when you need it most.
After: verify in layers
Day 1 to 3: access
Look at crawler logs for the protected URLs. You want to see AI bots receiving 200s, or clean single-hop redirects followed by 200s. Error tracking with failure explanations shows 404s, 5xx and timeouts. Fix these first; everything else depends on them.
Week 1 to 2: discovery
Watch whether bots are recrawling the new URLs. A weekly site audit with 21 checks and a health score gives you a quick scan of broken links and crawlability regressions.
Week 2 to 6: citations
Compare Page Tracker data for the protected set against the baseline. Expect some turbulence. What you are looking for is direction: recovering, flat, or falling. Pages that fall and have clean logs usually lost content; pages that fall with errors lost access.
Week 4 and on: traffic
Check AI-referred sessions and conversions on the protected pages. A citation that returns but no longer converts suggests the new page has a conversion problem, not a visibility problem.
Domain changes need extra care
If the brand name or domain changes, aliasing matters. Promptwatch supports brand aliases and a Brand Book whose analysis instructions decide what counts as a mention, so update both so that "OldName" and "NewName" are treated as the same brand during the transition. Otherwise your share-of-voice line will show an imaginary collapse.
Also expect third-party pages to keep citing your old URLs for a while. Offsite mentions, where your brand is named without a link, need outreach to correct, and redirects are your protection in the meantime.
What can go wrong
- Redirect chains. Old to intermediate to new loses bot patience and complicates debugging.
- Canonical tags pointing at the old host. Conflicting signals confuse retrieval.
- Content stripped by a new template. The most common silent loss.
- Tracking gaps. No logs in week one means no diagnosis.
Recommendation
Do the baseline even if everything else is rushed. It takes an afternoon and turns a migration from a leap of faith into a measured change. Promptwatch gives you the three baselines in one place: citations, crawler logs and AI-referred visits, per page, with Page Tracker as the before-and-after dashboard. If your launch date is fixed and your budget is not, start with the Page Tracker on your protected list and connect crawler logs before cutover, so the first week after launch is covered.