Site Migration Checklist: Keeping AI Crawlers and Citations Intact
A before, during, and after checklist for site migrations that protects AI citations as well as classic rankings.
Migration plans have a familiar shape. Map old URLs to new ones, set redirects, check rankings, wait. That plan was written for classic search. It leaves out the quiet risk in AI search: an engine that has learned to cite one of your URLs now has to learn the new one, and during the gap a competitor can take the slot.
The checklist below adds the AI layer to the standard plan. It is organized by phase so you can paste it into a project doc.
Before the move
Baseline your citations. Record which of your pages are cited, for which prompts, and how often. Without a baseline, you will not know what you lost. In Promptwatch, pin your key URLs with Page Tracker, and note first cited, peak rate, and decay half-life for each in Citation Trends.
Baseline your crawl activity. Note which bots fetch which sections, and how often. Agent Analytics shows IP-verified requests from the bots it tracks, including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Agent. Export the logs as CSV before the move so the comparison survives any change of logging setup.
Rank pages by value. Start with the pages that earn citations. They need the most careful mapping.
Check the prompt set. Keep a stable list of prompts you will run before and after. Do not change the list during the migration, or you will not know whether the change in results came from the move or from the new prompts.
Plan the logging. If crawler logs come from your CDN or host and you are changing either, make sure logging is set up on the new side before cutover. Promptwatch supports Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, Akamai, Google Cloud CDN, a custom HTTP endpoint, and a WordPress plugin.
During the move
One-to-one redirects for cited pages. Send each old URL to the closest new equivalent with a permanent redirect. Avoid chains. Avoid sending many old pages to the homepage.
Keep content equivalent. A migration is not the moment to rewrite the pages that earn citations. Change the address first and the words later. If you change both, you cannot tell which change hurt.
Update robots.txt and sitemaps. Confirm the new site allows the bots you want, uses the right names, and lists the new URLs. Remember there is no bot called "ChatGPTBot," so check your file for rules that do nothing.
Check bot protection. New hosting often brings a new firewall or bot-challenge setting. A configuration that treats AI bots as threats will return errors to them while looking fine to humans.
Preserve structured elements. Titles, headings, and any structured data should carry over. Do not drop elements that exist on the old page.
First 72 hours after the move
Watch the crawler logs daily. The first sign of trouble is a drop in successful bot requests or a spike in errors. Error tracking in Agent Analytics gives failure explanations and lets you filter by path, so you can narrow to the section that broke.
Fetch the old URLs. Confirm each redirects correctly. Sample the cited pages first.
Check the new URLs. Confirm each returns a normal response and the text is readable without scripts.
Run the prompt panel. Compare against the baseline. Do not panic over a small dip on day two, since engines refresh their sources over time.
Weeks two to six
Compare citation trends. Look at which pinned pages have recovered and which have not. A page that fetches fine, redirects properly, and still is not cited after several weeks may have lost relevance during the move, or a competitor may have taken the slot.
Use the Action Board. Its Discovery agent runs weekly and proposes up to five evidence-backed actions. After a migration, that list is useful for catching regressions you did not think to check.
Run a site audit. Promptwatch runs weekly Site Health audits with 21 checks, a health score, and what changed since the last run, plus a weekly email. Compare the first post-move audit against the last pre-move one.
Refresh what fell. For pages that recovered slowly, use Content Refresh suggestions to update them once the address is stable.
Common failure modes
- Redirects pointing to the homepage rather than the equivalent page.
- Staging robots rules copied into production, blocking everything.
- A new CDN that rejects bots.
- Logs not set up on the new host, leaving a blind period.
- Prompts changed mid-migration, which ruins the comparison.
- Content rewritten and moved at the same time.
What to tell stakeholders
Say up front that classic rankings and AI citations recover on different timelines. Set an expectation of a few weeks of monitoring, not a launch-day verdict. Share a simple dashboard with three numbers: successful bot requests, citation rate on pinned pages, and AI-referred visits from visitor analytics.
Plan notes
Crawler logs start on the Professional plan, so Essential brands should plan for that or use their own server logs for the migration window.
The recommendation
Add three tasks to your migration plan: baseline citations, baseline crawler logs, and a daily log check for three days after cutover. Promptwatch covers all three with Page Tracker, Citation Trends, and Agent Analytics. Set it up before the move, because a baseline cannot be taken afterward.