After a Site Migration: What to Check in Search Console

In the week after a migration, the job is to watch three things in Search Console, test the redirects yourself, and resist the urge to change anything else. Old URLs should show as redirecting, new URLs should start appearing as indexed, and 404s should only be the ones you chose. Google's own site move documentation says a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more to settle and that temporary ranking swings are expected. The week after is for catching mistakes, not for judging the result.

This post is part of our guide to Migrating a Website With AI.

Launch day, before you close the laptop

Five checks, in order:

Confirm noindex is off. If you built with site-wide noindex on, which you should have, turning it off is part of the launch. A site that launches with noindex still on is the one migration mistake that gets worse by the hour.
Submit the new sitemap in Search Console. Google's site move guide says to submit the new sitemap and, once Google is using it, you can remove the old one. Warnings on the old sitemap about redirecting URLs are expected during the transition.
Test the top 50 old URLs. Each should land on the right new page in one hop with no detour through an error page. The list comes from the redirect map, sorted by old traffic, and Redirect Mapping From a CSV has a short script that tests every row at once.
Run the URL Inspection tool on a handful of old URLs and a handful of new ones. The site move guide recommends it for testing individual URLs. It will show the redirect for old URLs and, for new ones, whether Google can fetch them.
If the domain changed, submit the Change of Address. Per the Change of Address tool help, the tool works only for domain-level properties, so it is for a domain or subdomain change, used after the redirects are live. Its effect lasts 180 days, and Google asks you to keep redirects in place for at least that long, longer if the old URLs still get traffic from search. A move within the same domain does not use the tool.

What to watch, day by day

The Page indexing report

Search Console's Page indexing report is where a migration shows up first. What you want to see over the first days and weeks is the count of indexed URLs on the old site falling and the count on the new site rising.

The reasons worth reading:

Page with redirect. Old URLs should move into this status. That is correct. The redirect target is what gets indexed.
Not found (404). Compare this list against the rows you chose to drop. A URL here that was supposed to redirect is a missing row in the map. The report itself says a 404 is fine for a page removed without replacement, and a 301 is the answer for a page that moved.
Redirect error. A chain that was too long, a loop, or a bad URL in the chain. Any entry here is a bug in the map.
URL marked noindex. Should be empty, or only the pages you deliberately excluded.

An AI agent can help here in a limited way: give it the exported list of 404s from the report and the redirect map, and ask it to list the 404s that have no row and the rows whose target now 404s. It cannot see the report itself, but it can do the comparison faster than you can.

The Sitemaps report

Check that the new sitemap was read and how many URLs it discovered. If the count is far below the pages you built, something is excluding them. If the old sitemap is still listed and all of its URLs are redirecting, that is expected; remove it once the new site is indexed.

Performance

Clicks and impressions by page for the new URLs should start appearing within days. Do not read the totals yet. Google's site move guide says ranking fluctuations are to be expected while Google recrawls and reindexes, and a week is too short to say anything about rankings. What you can read in week one is whether the new URLs appear at all.

A day-by-day plan for the first week

Day	Check	If something is wrong
0 (launch)	Noindex off, sitemap submitted, top 50 old URLs tested, URL Inspection on a sample	Fix the row or the setting before you stop for the day
1	Page indexing report: any "Redirect error" or new 404s	Add or correct rows; test each fix by hand
2	Sitemaps report: new sitemap read, URL count close to the pages you built	If it is low, look for pages still marked noindex or missing from the build
3	404 export compared with the drop list by the agent	Every 404 not on the drop list gets a row
4	Forms: send a test from each form and confirm it arrives	Fix the form before the weekend, when enquiries pile up unseen
5	Performance by page: do the new URLs appear at all	Do not judge rankings yet
7	Validate fix on any issue you corrected	Then leave it for a week

Day four is not about search, and it is the one most often missed. A redirect problem costs rankings slowly; a contact form that quietly fails costs the enquiries that the site exists for.

Fixing what you find

The fixes in week one are almost always rows: a missing redirect, a redirect to a page that does not exist, a chain where an old URL redirects to another old URL that redirects again. Add the row, collapse the chain, test the URL again.

After you fix a set of pages, the Page indexing report has a Validate fix button on the issue. Per the report's help page, Search Console checks a sample, then rechecks the affected URLs, and validation typically takes up to about two weeks. Start it once the fixes are in, not after each one.

What not to fix in week one: the design, the copy, the page structure, the internal links. Each change gives Google one more thing to re-evaluate at the same time as the move. The site move guide advises planning changes one after the other rather than all at once.

Beyond the week

Keep the redirects. The site move guide says at least a year, ideally longer. If the domain changed, at least the 180 days the Change of Address covers. The practical answer is to keep them for as long as the new site exists, and to keep paying for whatever plan they depend on.
Keep the old property in Search Console. You will want it to confirm the old URLs have dropped out.
Check again at one month and three months. Compare clicks by page between the old property's last full quarter and the new property's first. Pages that lost most of their clicks and are not recovering are the ones to look at for a content or redirect problem.
Ask the assistants. Once the new pages are indexed, ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity what your business does and where it is. If they still describe the old site, the new pages are not yet the ones they read; give it time and check that the business details on the new site are complete.
Cancel the old platform only when the images are safe, form entries are exported, the redirects have been resolving from the new host for a few weeks, and nothing in the Page indexing report points back at the old site.

The habit that matters most in this phase is the simplest one: look at the report every morning for the first two weeks. A problem found on day two is one missing row. The same problem found in month three is a month of lost traffic on the pages it affected.

How this works in Beste

Beste regenerates the sitemap on every publish, so the new URLs are in it from launch, and submitting it in Search Console is a one-time step. Search Console is not a Beste integration: you verify the domain on Google's side and submit the sitemap there, as the integrations page says. The site-wide noindex switch that kept the unfinished site out of search while you built it is in SEO Settings, described on the technical SEO page, and the menu shows a warning while it is on, which is how you confirm at a glance that it is off at launch.

Redirect rows that the week reveals as missing can be added one at a time in the editor or by an agent with add_redirect over the MCP server, and a corrected CSV can be re-imported on Pro with the same preview of matched, duplicate and unmatched rows. Reads over MCP never count toward a limit, so an agent can list every page on the live site and compare it against the redirect map as often as you like. Every publish also refreshes the structured data and the site's /llms.txt file, which is part of how assistants pick up the new pages; the agent-ready page describes both. Analytics on Pro gives a second view of landing pages beside Search Console.

Two things to know about the plan in this phase. Redirects, password protection and analytics are Pro features, and per the pricing page, if a Pro plan is cancelled the site stays live but redirects stop working. So the redirects that are protecting your rankings this week depend on the plan staying active, and they keep mattering long after the week is over. The rest of the ongoing care, keeping content current after the move, is in Keeping a Website Current With an AI Agent.